Local Search for Constraint Satisfaction

Speaker:        Professor Abdul Sattar
                Griffith University
                Australia

Title:          "Local Search for Constraint Satisfaction"

Date:           Monday, 11 November 2013

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Constraint satisfaction paradigm has become a powerful approach to model
complex real world problems and solve them efficiently using
general-purpose constraint solving techniques.  This talk will discuss how
a range of problems from diverse fields can be represented as constraint
satisfaction problems. Given these problems are in general computationally
intractable, we argue that local search based solving methods are more
suitable than backtracking based methods. We will then present some of our
recent results on solving the propositional satisfiability problems,
vertex cover problem, and some open issues.


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Biography:

Professor Abdul Sattar is the founding Director of the Institute for
Integrated and Intelligent Systems and a Professor of Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence at Griffith University. He is also a Research
Leader in NICTA's Optimisation Research Group. He has been an academic
staff member at Griffith University since February 1992 as a lecturer
(1992-95), senior lecturer (1996-99), and professor (2000-present) within
the School of Information and Communication Technology.  Prior to his
career at Griffith University, he was a lecturer in Physics in Rajasthan,
India (1980-82), research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
(1982-85), the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985-87), and the
University of Alberta, Canada (1987-1991).

He has published about 200 papers in international journals and
conferences, several of these papers appeared in premier conferences and
journals such as IJCAI, AAAI, AIJ, JAIR, CP, AAMAS. His research team has
several international awards in recent years including IJCAI 2007
Distinguished Paper award, PRICAI 2010 best paper award, Gold Medals in
the 2005, 2007 and 2012 SAT solver competitions; first place in
International Planning competitions in 2008 and 2011. He successfully
supervised over 20 PhD students. His student won best thesis award
nationally in Australia as well as internationally at ICASP 2012.  His
current research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning,
constraint satisfaction, intelligent scheduling, rational agents,
propositional satisfiability, temporal reasoning, temporal databases, and
bioinformatics.