Christopher Beck

Biography

J. Christopher Beck is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto in 1999 on the topic of knowledge-based heuristic search algorithms for constraint-directed scheduling. Chris then spent three years on the Scheduler Team at ILOG, SA (now part of IBM) in Paris, France, developing industrial constraint-directed scheduling software. He then was a Staff Scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland for two years. Since 2004, he has been at the University of Toronto. Professor Beck’s research interests continue to include scheduling, heuristic search, and constraint programming but have widened to include hybrid optimization combining mixed-integer programming and constraint programming, constraint integer programming, optimization under uncertainty, queueing theory, online algorithms, and multi-agent negotiation for coupled combinatorial optimization problems. Professor Beck holds editorial positions at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research; Constraints (Letters Editor); Constraint Programming Letters; the Knowledge Engineering Review; and the Mathematical Programming Glossary. Chris has served as program chair or chair of four international conferences and symposia and is the President-Elect of the Executive Council for the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. J. Christopher Beck is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto in 1999 on the topic of knowledge-based heuristic search algorithms for constraint-directed scheduling. Chris then spent three years on the Scheduler Team at ILOG, SA (now part of IBM) in Paris, France, developing industrial constraint-directed scheduling software. He then was a Staff Scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland for two years. Since 2004, he has been at the University of Toronto. Professor Beck’s research interests continue to include scheduling, heuristic search, and constraint programming but have widened to include hybrid optimization combining mixed-integer programming and constraint programming, constraint integer programming, optimization under uncertainty, queueing theory, online algorithms, and multi-agent negotiation for coupled combinatorial optimization problems. Professor Beck holds editorial positions at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research; Constraints (Letters Editor); Constraint Programming Letters; the Knowledge Engineering Review; and the Mathematical Programming Glossary. Chris has served as program chair or chair of four international conferences and symposia and is the President-Elect of the Executive Council for the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling.

Research Interest

Optimization; heuristic search; constraint programming; scheduling; hybrid algorithms; dynamic and uncertain problems; problem modeling.