Chris Beck

Chris has a strong industrial background in scheduling and constraint programming. He has worked as a Senior Scientist on the Scheduler Team at ILOG SA, at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland, in the Intelligent Scheduling Research Group of the Enterprise Integration Laboratory at the University of Toronto, and in the scheduling group at Numetrix Ltd.

Chris obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto, where he is currently a Professor.

Mark Fox

Mark is Chairman and CEO of Novator Systems, a supplier of online retail and customer care solutions for major businesses, including FTD, New Line Cinema, and Sony Corporation.

Prior to founding Novator, Mark co-founded Carnegie Group Inc. (CGI), a publicly owned software company that has become the largest independent information technology services firm in Canada, and the fifth largest in North America. Mark is a Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, is head of the Enterprise Integration Laboratory, and Director of the Graduate Program in Integrated Manufacturing.

Mark holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University, where he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, as well as Director of the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Systems of The Robotics Institute.

Aditya Ghose

Aditya is a professor at the University of Wollongong and a director of the University's Decisions Systems Laboratory. His research interests line in the theory and application of constraint programming, with a special emphasis on solving over-constrained problems, and distributed, multi-agent techniques.

Aditya has completed major projects with organizations such as BHP Billiton, Bluescope Steel, and the New South Wales State Emergency Services, in the areas of scheduling, integrated planning and scheduling, manpower optimization, and truck optimization. He also has interests in broader supply chain management challenges, including whole-of-enterprise approaches to the planning and design of optimization systems, and is a frequent speaker at industry supply chain conferences.

Aditya holds a Bachelor of Engg. from Jadavpur University, Kolkata India, and an MSc and PhD from the University of Alberta.

Randy Goebel

Randy has worked on research projects in crew, pipeline, and steel mill scheduling, as well as other scheduling and optimization projects for the Alberta energy industry. He is currently President and CEO of ICORE, the Alberta informatics research funding agency, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, and principle investigator in the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning.

Randy’s current research includes work on systems biology, machine learning, and visualization. He has held appointments at the University of Waterloo, University of Tokyo, and Multimedia University (Malaysia), and has also collaborated with researchers at DFKI (German Centre for AI Research), NICTA (National ICT Australia), RWC (Real World Computing project, Japan), ICOT (Institute for New Generation Computing, Japan), NII (National Informatics Institute, Tokyo). Randy is actively involved in academic and industrial collaborative research projects in Canada, Australia, Europe, China, and Malaysia.

Randy holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia and a MSc from the University of Alberta, both in Computer Science.

Holger Hoos

Holger is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia, a founding member of the Bioinformatics, Empirical & Theoretical Algorithmics Laboratory (BETA-Lab), a member of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI), and a faculty associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

His research has been published in books, journal articles, and at major conferences in AI and OR. His PhD thesis received the “Best Dissertation Award” of the German Informatics Society.