User:Patrick De Causmaecker

From 1979 till 1984, he was affiliated with the University of Leuven as a researcher for the Belgian inter university institute for nuclear physics where he, together with others, established a calculus for computing cross sections in collisions of elementary particle physics. This calculus of helicity amplitudes, based on an elegant representations of the helicity vectors, is intensively used in multiple domains of elementary particle high energy physics. After he switched to the then booming field of information processing in 1984, he has been educating students at various levels in computer science. From 1994 on he has successfully conducted research in heuristic optimization and constraint solving, especially in scheduling and rostering when human time spending was involved. This research was in close cooperation with a multitude of small and medium sized companies specialized in planning and scheduling for production, transport, education and medical care. Since 2005, he started working on optimized scheduling in distributed systems and networks as a way to improve the quality of experience. At present he is especially interested in structures and quantitative methods to gauge the performance of algorithms for combinatorial optimization, in generality of such algorithms and in expressive languages for describing such models. Special attention goes to developments in metaheuristics and hyperheuristics. Since 1997, he succeeded and participated in a large number of bilateral, funded national and international projects with subjects ranging from industrial applications of combinatorial optimization for planning and scheduling, astrophysics of the sun, high technological applications of energy beams at nano, micro and macro scales to fundamental questions on the relation between knowledge representation and heuristic algorithms. In 2002-2003 he spent one year with the ASAP (Automated Scheduling, optimisAtion and Planning) group at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is reviewer for major journals and conferences, and is member of the steering committee of the PATAT series of conferences. He is a full professor of informatics at the KULAK campus of KU Leuven. He is the head of the CODeS Group within the department of Computer Science, which he created together with his colleagues at KaHo St.-Lieven in 2009. This latter part of CODeS is presently a leading research group in the new KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology.