Scientific Advisory Committee

Greet Vanden Berghe’s primary research interest is related to operational research.  She focuses in particular on solving complex industrial combinatorial optimization problems.  Examples of such problems include timetabling, scheduling and vehicle routing problems and combinations thereof. Recently, she also became interested in dynamic combinatorial optimization, which intelligently employs data that becomes available during schedule execution. All these research activities involve mathematical modelling and the development of intelligent search algorithms such as heuristic search and decomposition methods.

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.

Professor Joanna Batstone, PhD, DEng, FTSE is a leading global expert on AI, data analytics and technology. She has more than 20 years’ experience in top executive roles in the USA, Europe and Australia, helping universities, companies and government use technology to meet their goals.

Joanna is the Director of the Monash Data Futures Institute at Monash University, supporting government, companies and organisations in using AI, data science and analytics to develop governance and policy for social good. Joanna is building a global reputation for the institute’s ground-breaking work, along with a digital ecosystem to foster collaborative research with industry engagement. Responsible for data science and AI across the university, Joanna is passionate about the benefits of AI driving major change for social good.

Joanna joined Monash after a range of technical and business leadership roles in IBM’s Research and development laboratories, including work with IBM Watson.

José Fernando Oliveira is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. He also teaches at Porto Business School. He is a senior researcher in the Industrial Engineering and Management Center of the research institute INESC TEC. His main area of scientific activity is Operations Research and Management Science. He regularly publishes his research results, originated in projects funded by R&D funding agencies, in highly regarded Operational Research journals and keeps an ongoing consultancy activity with companies and other private and public organizations, with dozens of successfully completed projects.  He has supervised 50+ Ph.D. and MSc thesis, and his teaching activity has run around the areas of Statistics, Operations Research and Operations Management and Logistics.

From his many past academic and service positions, stand out the General Council of the University of Porto, the Vice-Presidency of the Pedagogical Council of FEUP, the Vice-Presidency of the European Association of Operational Research Societies, and the Presidency of the Portuguese Operational Research Society. He is a member of the Industrial Engineering and Management Board of the Portuguese Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education and an evaluator for the Portuguese National Agency for Science and Technology, as well as for similar agencies in other countries. He is currently co-editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Operational Research and a member of the editorial board of several other scientific journals. He is also the President of the Scientific Council for Exact Sciences and Engineering of the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology.

Prof. Sebastian Pokutta serves as the Vice President at the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB): Home | zib.de and holds a professorship in Optimization and Machine Learning at Technische Universität Berlin. His research group focuses on Artificial Intelligence, developing AI systems for real-world applications, as well as creating new optimization algorithms and integrating machine learning techniques with decision-making processes. In a nutshell, their work leverages computers to learn from data and enhance decision-making.

More info: Sebastian Pokutta – Interactive Optimization and Learning