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Professor
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Pascal Van Hentenryck is Professor in the Melbourne School of Engineering at the University of Melbourne and the leader of the Optimization Research Group at NICTA. Prior to that, he was professor of computer science at Brown University where he joined that faculty in 1990. His main research interests are the design and implementation of optimization systems and their applications to complex problems. His current research projects focus on the use of optimization in disaster management, future energy systems, as well as in logistics and supply chains. He has written five books published by the MIT Press and built several optimization systems that are widely used in academia and industry. He received an NSF Young investigator award in 1993, the 2002 INFORMS Computer Society Award, two Honorary Doctorate Degrees from the University of Louvain and the University of Nantes, the Philip J. Bray Award for Teaching Excellence in the Physical Sciences at Brown University, and became a fellow of AAAI in 2009. He has given plenary talks at the main conferences in artificial intelligence and operations research. Pascal has been teaching discrete optimization at Brown University, the University of Louvain, and now the University of Melbourne for almost 20 years. |
Professor's Assistant
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Carleton Coffrin began his academic career as a Theatrical Lighting Designer and received a B.F.A. from the University of Connecticut in May 2006. After freelancing for several years Carleton became frustrated by all of the NP-Hard problems faced by the Theatre industry. Determined to solve these problems with computers, he returned to school to pursue a Ph.D. discrete optimization. Carleton completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in May 2012 at Brown University under the supervision of Pascal Van Hentenryck. Although he dreams of revolutionizing the Theatre industry with optimization technology, he is taking a little detour as a research staff member at NICTA where he applies optimization research to problems in Disaster Management and Power Systems. While at Brown University, Carleton had the opportunity to be both a student and a teaching assistant for Pascal's Discrete Optimization class. |
Teaching Assistants
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Victor Pillac holds a Ph. D. in Operations Research from the Ecole des Mines de Nantes (France) and Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia). His research interests go toward online combinatorial optimisation and the development of software libraries. His work includes the development of a decision support system for long-term manpower planning in airline companies, the design and development of open-source libraries for dynamic vehicle routing. He is currently working on the development of the Disaster Management platform at NICTA. |
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Andrea Rendl stumbled across Constraint Programming during an exchange year in Stockholm, Sweden, while doing a Masters in Telematics in Graz, Austria. She was so intrigued that she continued with a PhD in Constraint Programming at the University of St Andrews, UK, which she completed in 2010. Since then, she has worked on solving real-world optimization problems in Vienna, Austria, and is now researcher at NICTA's Optimization Research Group in Melbourne, Australia. Andrea is particularly passionate about constraint modeling, hybrid approaches, uncertainty, hiking and raspberries. |
Course Material Teaching Assistants
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Jerry Gamble is an I.T. consultant with THNK, LLC and works with businesses in a wide variety of vertical markets to design and develop software. He is currently contracted with a financial management firm to develop and improve machine learning algorithms for proprietary trading platforms. Jerry has prior work experience in the field of Interactive Media and continues to independently study data visualization. |
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Mark Mammel is a researcher at the US Food and Drug Administration near Washington, DC. He uses bioinformatics for comparative genomics of foodborne pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella in order to study their relatedness and traceback outbreak strains to environmental sources. Mark has an MS in Microbiology and MS in Computer Science. Besides programming contests and puzzles, Mark likes bicycling, geocaching, juggling, and the trombone. He has a wife and three kids, ages 6,10, and 12. |
Special Thanks
We cannot thank enough the following volunteers who tested the course material:
Caroline Even, David Eisenstat, Eric Dobson, Maximilian Barrows, Menkes van den Briel, Nabeel Gillani, Rodrigo Gumucio, Serdar Kadioglu, Siddhartha Jain, Valentin Mayer-Eichberger
Staff
The production of this course would not be possible without the significant support of the Coursera and University of Melbourne staff. In particular, the teaching team would like to thank the following support staff:
Astrid Ilze Bovell (copyright), Bronwyn Disseldorp (e-learning), Deborah Jones (e-learning), Eileen Wall (video), Gavin Leys (illustration), Peter Mellow (e-learning), Seth Paddle (e-learning), Wil Villareal (copyright)
Finally, we also thank all of the Coursera production staff, who were very helpful and supportive during the production of this course.
Last Modified Mon 3 Mar 2014 5:03 AM CET