Professor
Joined School 2000
Bach (University of British Columbia),
Mast (University of Waterloo),
PhD (University of Waterloo)
| vanbeek@uwaterloo.ca | |
| Web | http://ai.uwaterloo.ca/~vanbeek |
| Voice | 519-888-4567 x35344 |
| Fax | 519-885-1208 |
|
| Peter Van Beek
Professor Joined School 2000 Bach (University of British Columbia),
|
Professor van Beek's research has focused on constraint programming, a discipline at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research, and Programming Languages.
There are many interesting tasks for which constraint programming is particularly well-suited. These tasks range from ones that are simple for humans, such as vision and language comprehension, to ones that are difficult for humans, such as scheduling and planning. What these tasks have in common is that constraints are a natural part of the problem. A good example is scheduling people or machines. What is readily available are constraints such as a worker is only available for certain parts of the week or only able to do certain jobs.
Professor van Beek's research has spanned many of the subareas of constraint programming ranging from theoretical investigations of search algorithms to practical investigations of applying constraint programming methods to the important areas of scheduling, sequencing, and planning.
Fellow of the AAAI (2008); Best Paper Award, Canadian Conference on AI (2008); Outstanding Performance Award, University of Waterloo (2007); Faculty of Mathematics Fellow, University of Waterloo (2004-2007); IBM CAS Fellow (2003-2008); Best Paper Award (Innovative Applications Track), International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (2001); Best Paper Award, Canadian Conference on AI (2001); Outstanding Paper Award, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1995)
Since graduating in 1990, Professor van Beek has had several applied research projects.
In a past project, Professor van Beek and his students investigated constraint programming techniques for the sequencing and scheduling of manufacturing assembly lines, using car assembly lines as the test-bed application. The car assembly line sequencing problem arose from a collaboration with Shiva Soft Inc. (now Matrikon) of Edmonton, Alberta. A system developed by Shiva Soft using expert-system technology currently schedules the production of cars on assembly lines in two North American assembly plants of a major car company. Using a constraint programming approach, Professor van Beek and his students were able to significantly improve the production schedules as measured on real data.
More recently, Professor van Beek and his students have pursued a project with IBM Canada which investigated constraint programming techniques for instruction scheduling. Modern architectures allow instruction level parallelism and it is the job of the compiler to generate code that takes advantage of this parallelism. This task can be viewed as a scheduling task, where instructions are appropriately scheduled to start at a time step on a particular functional unit. Current compilers use non-optimal methods to solve the scheduling task. Professor van Beek and his students developed optimal approaches to the problem for realistic architectures, improving on previous approaches as measured on widely used industrial benchmarks.
T. Russell, A. M. Malik, M. Chase, and P. van Beek. Learning Heuristics for the Superblock Instruction Scheduling Problem. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 21(10):1489-1502, 2009.
T. Russell and P. van Beek. Determining the Number of Games Needed to Guarantee an NHL Playoff Spot. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (CPAIOR 2009), Pittsburgh, 233-247, 2009.
A.M. Malik, M. Chase, T. Russell, and P. van Beek. An Application of Constraint Programming to Superblock Instruction Scheduling. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, 2008.
T. Russell and P. van Beek. Mathematically Clinching a Playoff Spot in the NHL and the Effect of Scoring Systems. Proceedings of the 21st Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 234-245, 2008.
W. Li, P. Poupart, and P. van Beek. Exploiting Causal Independence Using Weighted Model Counting. Proceedings of the 23rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2008.
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
Contact | Feedback: cs-webmaster@cs.uwaterloo.ca | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | Faculty of Mathematics
Last modified: Monday, 20-Dec-2010 14:30:10 EST
