Carla Gomes

Biography

Carla Gomes is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, with joint appointments in the Dept. of Computer Science, Dept. of Information Science, and the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. Gomes obtained a Ph.D. in computer science in the area of artificial intelligence and operations research from the University of Edinburgh. She also holds an M.Sc. in applied mathematics from the University of Lisbon. Her research has covered several areas in artificial intelligence and computer science, including the integration of constraint reasoning, operations research, and machine learning techniques for solving scale constraint reasoning and optimization problems, complete randomized search methods, and algorithm portfolios, planning and scheduling, and multi agent systems. Gomes’s central research themes are the integration of concepts from constraint and logical reasoning, mathematical programming, and machine learning, for large scale combinatorial problems; the study of the impact of structure on problem hardness; and the use of randomization techniques to improve the performance of exact (complete) search methods. More recently, Gomes has become deeply immersed in research in the new field of Computational Sustainability. Gomes is the Lead PI of an NSF Expeditions in Computing award on Computational Sustainability and the director of the newly established Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University. Gomes is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Research Interest

My research area is Artificial Intelligence with a focus on large-scale constraint-based reasoning and optimization. I exploit connections between different research areas --- in particular artificial intelligence, operations research, and the theory of algorithms. Central themes of my research are: (1) the synthesis of formal and experimental research for understanding and exploiting problem structure, (2) the integration of concepts from constraint reasoning and mathematical programming, and (3) the use of randomization techniques to scale up the performance of complete (exact) search methods . I combine formal analysis with the study of applications such as planning, scheduling, combinatorial design, and multi-agent systems. Recently, I have become deeply immersed in the establishment of new field of Computational Sustainability.