Chris Beck is a Professor of Industrial Engineering at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto. Before joining U of T in 2004, he spent two years as a Staff Scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland and, before that, three years as Senior Scientist and Software Engineer on the Scheduler R&D team at ILOG in Paris, France. Chris’ PhD was in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto on constraint-based scheduling.

Chris has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, optimization, heuristic search, constraint programming, constraint-directed scheduling, AI planning, hybrid algorithms, dynamic and uncertain problems, problem modeling, and even some machine learning. He served as the President of the Executive Committee for the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling and the President of the Association for Constraint Programming. Chris is currently the Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.