News Archive

2012/06/18: SATzilla (our portfolio-based algorithm selector for SAT, joint work with Lin Xu, Frank Hutter, Jonathan Shen and Kevin Leyton-Brown, has lead the field in the 2012 SAT Challenge, placing 1st in 2 of the 3 main tracks, 2nd in the 3rd main track, and 1st in the sequential portfolio track - details can be found here.

2012/02/27: Check out Programming by Optimisation (PbO) - a paradigm for software development based on the idea of avoiding premature commitment, seeking design alternatives and automatically generating performance-optimised software. Further information can be found here (including a link to my recent article in Communications of the ACM, tools and examples).

2011/11/08: A timetabling algorithm developed in my group (under the lead of my PhD student Chris Fawcett) is now used by UBC for university-wide scheduling of final examinations.

2010/07/13: Our work on portfolio-based algorithm selection for SAT (with Lin Xu, Frank Hutter and Kevin Leyton-Brown), published in the Journal of AI Research in 2008, has been awarded the 2010 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize. The SATzilla approach described in this article has lead to numerous medals wins in the 2009 and 2007 SAT Competitions.

2009/12/31: Information on my recently completed Coast-to-Coast Tour, during which I visited 20 universities in Canada and the Northern USA, can now be found here (including information on my talk "Taming the Complexity Monster" and a first selection of pictures from the trip).

2009/07/17: Our work on SATzilla (with Lin Xu, Frank Hutter and Kevin Leyton-Brown) has lead to excellent results at the 2009 SAT competition (further details can be found here and here.)

2008/12/07: I'll be teaching CPSC 536H, Topics in Algorithms: Empirical Algorithmics, in Spring 2009. Information on this course can be found at here.

2008/01/02: I'm back from my sabbatical. If you've sent me e-mail during my leave and never received a reply, I apologise: due to frequent travel and one major e-mail problem, your message may be at the bottom of a huge stack or lost entirely; if you resend your message now, I should be able to reply very soon.

2007/01/01: I am on sabbatical for all of 2007. During this time I'll travel quite a bit and may be difficult to reach via e-mail. In urgent cases, please contact my secretary, Evelyn Fong.

2006/06/10: The paper On the Quality and Quantity of Random Decisions in Stochastic Local Search for SAT (by my PhD student Dave Tompkins and myself) won the best paper award at the 19th Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence. The paper explores how the behaviour and performance of stochastic local search algorithms depend on random decisions and properties of the pseudo-random number generators used for implementing them.

2004/08/27: My book, Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications (co-authored with Thomas Stützle) has now been published - check it out!

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2012/06/18:		SATzilla (our portfolio-based algorithm selector for SAT, joint work with Lin Xu, Frank Hutter, Jonathan Shen and Kevin Leyton-Brown, has lead the field in the 2012 SAT Challenge, placing 1st in 2 of the 3 main tracks, 2nd in the 3rd main track, and 1st in the sequential portfolio track - details can be found here.
2012/02/27:		Check out Programming by Optimisation (PbO) - a paradigm for software development based on the idea of avoiding premature commitment, seeking design alternatives and automatically generating performance-optimised software. Further information can be found here (including a link to my recent article in Communications of the ACM, tools and examples).
2011/11/08:		A timetabling algorithm developed in my group (under the lead of my PhD student Chris Fawcett) is now used by UBC for university-wide scheduling of final examinations.
2010/07/13:		Our work on portfolio-based algorithm selection for SAT (with Lin Xu, Frank Hutter and Kevin Leyton-Brown), published in the Journal of AI Research in 2008, has been awarded the 2010 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize. The SATzilla approach described in this article has lead to numerous medals wins in the 2009 and 2007 SAT Competitions.
2009/12/31:		Information on my recently completed Coast-to-Coast Tour, during which I visited 20 universities in Canada and the Northern USA, can now be found here (including information on my talk "Taming the Complexity Monster" and a first selection of pictures from the trip).
2009/07/17:		Our work on SATzilla (with Lin Xu, Frank Hutter and Kevin Leyton-Brown) has lead to excellent results at the 2009 SAT competition (further details can be found here and here.)
2008/12/07:		I'll be teaching CPSC 536H, Topics in Algorithms: Empirical Algorithmics, in Spring 2009. Information on this course can be found at here.
2008/01/02:		I'm back from my sabbatical. If you've sent me e-mail during my leave and never received a reply, I apologise: due to frequent travel and one major e-mail problem, your message may be at the bottom of a huge stack or lost entirely; if you resend your message now, I should be able to reply very soon.
2007/01/01:		I am on sabbatical for all of 2007. During this time I'll travel quite a bit and may be difficult to reach via e-mail. In urgent cases, please contact my secretary, Evelyn Fong.
2006/06/10:		The paper On the Quality and Quantity of Random Decisions in Stochastic Local Search for SAT (by my PhD student Dave Tompkins and myself) won the best paper award at the 19th Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence. The paper explores how the behaviour and performance of stochastic local search algorithms depend on random decisions and properties of the pseudo-random number generators used for implementing them.
2004/08/27:		My book, Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications (co-authored with Thomas Stützle) has now been published - check it out!