IWO4: Bixby

International Workshop on
Interdisciplinary Decision Making

December 6-7, 2004
Melbourne, Australia

Program

Hotels

About the Speakers

Bob Bixby
President of the Technical Advisory Board, ILOG
Research Professor, Rice University
USA
Dr. Robert Bixby is a noted authority on the theory and practice of optimization. He is president of the Technical Advisory Board for ILOG, Inc. He is Research Professor of Management in Rice University's Jesse H. Jones School of Management, and Noah Harding Professor Emeritus of Computational and Applied Mathematics in Rice University's Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics.
Dr. Bixby earned a BS from the University of California-Berkeley and a PhD from Cornell University. He has held academic positions at Cornell, the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University, the Institute for Operations Research-Bonn, the Mathematics Institute of the University of Augsburg, the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum for Information Technology in Berlin, and the Technical University of Berlin.
Dr. Bixby is chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society and was formerly editor-in-chief of the journal Mathematics Programming. In addition, he has published over 50 papers and nearly 20 research reports. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has received the Mathematical Programming Society Beale-Orchard-Hayes Prize for Computational Mathematical Programming. He co-founded CPLEX Optimization, and has served on ILOG's board of directors.
Irv Lustig
Senior Technical Account Manager
ILOG, USA
Dr Lusting has been involved in the operations research community for over 15 years. Dr. Lustig is manager of technical services for ILOG Direct. Prior to his current role, he was a member of the CPLEX development team, where he was responsible for all CPLEX presolve and barrier algorithms. Dr. Lustig has taught at Princeton University, is a member in good standing of INFORMS and MPS and is a past chairperson for the INFORMS Computing Society. Dr. Lustig is currently a candidate for the office of President of INFORMS.
Janos D. Pinter
President, PCS Inc.
Adjunct Professor, Dalhousie University
Canada
Janos D. Pinter is a researcher, technical author, software developer, and practicioner. His primary research interests are related to the area of nonlinear / global / stochastic optimization.
He holds an M.Sc. from the University of Sciences (ELTE), Budapest; a Ph.D. from Moscow State (Lomonosov) University, Moscow; and a D.Sc. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest.
Dr. Pinter authored several books and nearly 150 scientific publications. His monograph titled 'Global Optimization in Action' was awarded the 2000 INFORMS Computing Society Prize for Research Excellence.
Dr. Pinter is a member of the Canadian and Hungarian Operations Research Societies, INFORMS, and SIAM. In 2002 he has been elected to serve as Vice Chair of Global Optimization for the Optimization Section of INFORMS. He serves on the Editorial Board of the 'Journal of Global Optimization', the 'Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences', 'Algorithmic Operations Research', and of the web fora 'GAMS Global World' and 'GAMS Performance World'.
He has been the recipient of professional grants, fellowships, and awards e.g. in Australia, Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the United States, and he has given invited lectures in over 25 countries. He is an INFORMS Speaker and CORS Traveling Speaker.
Dr. Pinter is the principal developer of the LGO, Excel/LGO, GAMS/LGO, Maple Global Optimization Toolbox, MathOptimizer, MathOptimizer Professional, and TOMLAB/LGO nonlinear optimization software products.
Bob Johnston
Professorial Fellow, The University of Melbourne
Australia
Prof Robert Johnston is a noted authority on applications of operations research in the web material industries, particularly in paper and packaging industries. He is currently an Honorary Professorial Fellow in Mathematics and Statistics at University of Melbourne, and a Professor Emeritus in Chemical Engineering at Monash University (where he Directed the Australian Pulp and Paper Institute for 11 years).
Prof Johnston studied Chemical Engineering at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and obtained a PhD in computer control from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He has held academic positions at University of Manchester and Victoria University of Technology, and has been a visiting academic at Imperial College, University of Tokyo and IMAG/Centre Technique du Papier at Grenoble, France. He has consulted widely and his software for cutting stock scheduling has been used in UK, France, Japan and Australia.
He has published over 40 peer reviewed papers and nearly 20 major consulting reports in the Operations Research field. He is a leader internationally in the forest products industries where he is currently member of the Selection Committee for the prestigious Marcus Wallenberg Prize, and incoming Chairman of the Atlanta based Tappi Research Management Committee.
Gary Froyland
University of New South Wales
Australia
Dr Froyland is Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of New South Wales. His research over the last three years has focused on Mine Optimisation and Integer Programming. Prior to joining UNSW, Dr Froyland was the technical leader of the Mine Optimisation Group within BHP Billiton Technology. Under his technical direction, this research group developed four distinct in-house mine scheduling software products that are now used to schedule the strategic life-of-mine plans at BHP Billiton's iron ore, copper, and diamond mines with project values in the billions of dollars. Dr Froyland is currently working with Prof. Peter Taylor and Assoc. Prof. Natashia Boland of the University of Melbourne on ways to increase the size of the mine optimisation models that can be solved and on methods of incorporating future price uncertainty into mining project value models.
Mark Wallace
Research Professor, Monash University
Australia
Mark Wallace is a leading researcher in the constraint programming community, and a pioneer of the application of this technology. His research is on hybrid algorithms combining techniques from Artificial Intelligence with those from Operations Research. At Imperial College he ran the team developing and supporting the most widely used academic constraint programming platform, ECLiPSe, which provides interfaces to both CPLEX and XPRESS-MP, and enables the programmer to combine linear constraint solving, with constraint propagation and local search. He was a founder shareholder of the constraint programming company Parc Technologies, which was recently sold to Cisco. Previously he worked for the computer company ICL in the UK, after completing a PhD on "Communicating with Databases in Natural Language". This year he was programme chair of the 10th International Constraint Programming conference.
Leon Sterling
Adacel Chair of Software Innovation,The University of Melbourne
Australia
Professor Sterling has been active in the overlap of the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering over the past 20 years. He has a strong background in logic programming, best known as the co-author of the classic book 'The Art of Prolog'. His current research focuses on agent-oriented software engineering. His Ph.D. was in computational group theory from the Australian National University. He was a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh and at the Weizmann Institute, before spending 10 years at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He returned to a Chair of Computer Science at the University of Melbourne in 1995.
Professor Sterling is acknowledged as a research leader and has been invited numerous times to be an invited speaker both nationally and internationally, including the Australian AI Conference and the Italian Logic Programming Conference. He has chaired four conference programme committees both nationally and internationally, and also organised several workshops. In addition, he has served on over 20 international conference programme committees, and turned down invitations to serve on many others. Professor Sterling has been particularly active in professional societies, This has been acknowledged by being made a Fellow of both IEAust and ACS. He is also currently President of Computing Research and Education (CORE), and is building links with the ACM. Leon Sterling has an impressive record in research training, having graduated over eighteen Ph.D. students in fourteen years, 19 Masters students, and supervised many honours students.

Moshe Sniedovich
University of Melbourne
Australia
Moshe is a Reader at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the University of Melbourne. He obtained his BSc from the Technion (Israel, 1968) and his PhD from the University of Arizona (USA, 1976). Prior to joining the University of Melbourne in 1989, he worked for the CSIR (South Africa, 1979-89), IBM (USA, 1977/9), and Princeton University (1976/7). His research interests are in the areas of sequential decision making, composite optimization and interactive computing and modelling, and water resources planning. He published one book and over eighty five articles and developed numerous web-based tutorial modules for applied mathematics and operations research subjects. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals and is a member of the executive committee of the Australian Society for Operations research (ASOR). He recently served as Vice President (Representing the Asia Pacific region) of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS,1998-2003). He has served on the program committees of numerous international conferences and workshops.

Mohan Krishnamoorthy
CSIRO
Australia
Dr Mohan Krishnamoorthy is the leader of research in the areas of Decision Making for Industrial Processes and Business Services, at CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences.
Mohan has lectured in Operational Research at The University of Kent, Canterbury, UK (Dec 1990 to Dec 1991) and was a Research & Tutorial Assistant at Imperial College, London (Nov 1986 to Nov 1990). He has published many papers in refereed journals and in conference proceedings. Mohan has also edited a special issue of the "Annals of Operations Research" with Dr Natashia Boland and Dr Peter Stuckey, both from University of Melbourne.
He has active collaborative research links with researchers at Imperial College (London), Lehigh University (Bethlehem), University of Missouri at St Louis, University of Kent (Canterbury, UK) and Erasmus University (Rotterdam). He is a member of the Australian Society of Operations Research (ASOR), and an Associate Member of the Institute of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), North America. Mohan was the keynote speaker for the National Conference of the Australian Society of Operations Research in 2001.

At CSIRO since 1992, Mohan undertakes tactical research into operations research (OR) problems faced by industrial clients. He also carries out strategic research into generic OR problems and their solution methodologies. His main interests are in complex routing and scheduling problems, man power scheduling, rostering, the location of spatially interacting facilities, vehicle despatch problems, constrained spanning trees, neural networks, and a variety of operations research problems faced by the airline industry. His research interests include the design, development, analysis and computational testing of exact, heuristic and novel solution) algorithms for graph, network and combinatorial optimisation problems. As a research scientist at CSIRO, he has worked directly with several clients on operations research problems of critical importance to their operations.

Bob Bixby President of the Technical Advisory Board, ILOG Research Professor, Rice University USA Dr. Robert Bixby is a noted authority on the theory and practice of optimization. He is president of the Technical Advisory Board for ILOG, Inc. He is Research Professor of Management in Rice University's Jesse H. Jones School of Management, and Noah Harding Professor Emeritus of Computational and Applied Mathematics in Rice University's Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Dr. Bixby earned a BS from the University of California-Berkeley and a PhD from Cornell University. He has held academic positions at Cornell, the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University, the Institute for Operations Research-Bonn, the Mathematics Institute of the University of Augsburg, the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum for Information Technology in Berlin, and the Technical University of Berlin. Dr. Bixby is chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society and was formerly editor-in-chief of the journal Mathematics Programming. In addition, he has published over 50 papers and nearly 20 research reports. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has received the Mathematical Programming Society Beale-Orchard-Hayes Prize for Computational Mathematical Programming. He co-founded CPLEX Optimization, and has served on ILOG's board of directors.

Irv Lustig Senior Technical Account Manager ILOG, USA Dr Lusting has been involved in the operations research community for over 15 years. Dr. Lustig is manager of technical services for ILOG Direct. Prior to his current role, he was a member of the CPLEX development team, where he was responsible for all CPLEX presolve and barrier algorithms. Dr. Lustig has taught at Princeton University, is a member in good standing of INFORMS and MPS and is a past chairperson for the INFORMS Computing Society. Dr. Lustig is currently a candidate for the office of President of INFORMS.

Janos D. Pinter President, PCS Inc. Adjunct Professor, Dalhousie University Canada Janos D. Pinter is a researcher, technical author, software developer, and practicioner. His primary research interests are related to the area of nonlinear / global / stochastic optimization. He holds an M.Sc. from the University of Sciences (ELTE), Budapest; a Ph.D. from Moscow State (Lomonosov) University, Moscow; and a D.Sc. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. Dr. Pinter authored several books and nearly 150 scientific publications. His monograph titled 'Global Optimization in Action' was awarded the 2000 INFORMS Computing Society Prize for Research Excellence. Dr. Pinter is a member of the Canadian and Hungarian Operations Research Societies, INFORMS, and SIAM. In 2002 he has been elected to serve as Vice Chair of Global Optimization for the Optimization Section of INFORMS. He serves on the Editorial Board of the 'Journal of Global Optimization', the 'Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences', 'Algorithmic Operations Research', and of the web fora 'GAMS Global World' and 'GAMS Performance World'. He has been the recipient of professional grants, fellowships, and awards e.g. in Australia, Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the United States, and he has given invited lectures in over 25 countries. He is an INFORMS Speaker and CORS Traveling Speaker. Dr. Pinter is the principal developer of the LGO, Excel/LGO, GAMS/LGO, Maple Global Optimization Toolbox, MathOptimizer, MathOptimizer Professional, and TOMLAB/LGO nonlinear optimization software products.

Bob Johnston Professorial Fellow, The University of Melbourne Australia Prof Robert Johnston is a noted authority on applications of operations research in the web material industries, particularly in paper and packaging industries. He is currently an Honorary Professorial Fellow in Mathematics and Statistics at University of Melbourne, and a Professor Emeritus in Chemical Engineering at Monash University (where he Directed the Australian Pulp and Paper Institute for 11 years). Prof Johnston studied Chemical Engineering at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and obtained a PhD in computer control from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He has held academic positions at University of Manchester and Victoria University of Technology, and has been a visiting academic at Imperial College, University of Tokyo and IMAG/Centre Technique du Papier at Grenoble, France. He has consulted widely and his software for cutting stock scheduling has been used in UK, France, Japan and Australia. He has published over 40 peer reviewed papers and nearly 20 major consulting reports in the Operations Research field. He is a leader internationally in the forest products industries where he is currently member of the Selection Committee for the prestigious Marcus Wallenberg Prize, and incoming Chairman of the Atlanta based Tappi Research Management Committee.

Gary Froyland University of New South Wales Australia Dr Froyland is Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of New South Wales. His research over the last three years has focused on Mine Optimisation and Integer Programming. Prior to joining UNSW, Dr Froyland was the technical leader of the Mine Optimisation Group within BHP Billiton Technology. Under his technical direction, this research group developed four distinct in-house mine scheduling software products that are now used to schedule the strategic life-of-mine plans at BHP Billiton's iron ore, copper, and diamond mines with project values in the billions of dollars. Dr Froyland is currently working with Prof. Peter Taylor and Assoc. Prof. Natashia Boland of the University of Melbourne on ways to increase the size of the mine optimisation models that can be solved and on methods of incorporating future price uncertainty into mining project value models.

Mark Wallace Research Professor, Monash University Australia Mark Wallace is a leading researcher in the constraint programming community, and a pioneer of the application of this technology. His research is on hybrid algorithms combining techniques from Artificial Intelligence with those from Operations Research. At Imperial College he ran the team developing and supporting the most widely used academic constraint programming platform, ECLiPSe, which provides interfaces to both CPLEX and XPRESS-MP, and enables the programmer to combine linear constraint solving, with constraint propagation and local search. He was a founder shareholder of the constraint programming company Parc Technologies, which was recently sold to Cisco. Previously he worked for the computer company ICL in the UK, after completing a PhD on "Communicating with Databases in Natural Language". This year he was programme chair of the 10th International Constraint Programming conference.

Leon Sterling Adacel Chair of Software Innovation,The University of Melbourne Australia Professor Sterling has been active in the overlap of the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering over the past 20 years. He has a strong background in logic programming, best known as the co-author of the classic book 'The Art of Prolog'. His current research focuses on agent-oriented software engineering. His Ph.D. was in computational group theory from the Australian National University. He was a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh and at the Weizmann Institute, before spending 10 years at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He returned to a Chair of Computer Science at the University of Melbourne in 1995. Professor Sterling is acknowledged as a research leader and has been invited numerous times to be an invited speaker both nationally and internationally, including the Australian AI Conference and the Italian Logic Programming Conference. He has chaired four conference programme committees both nationally and internationally, and also organised several workshops. In addition, he has served on over 20 international conference programme committees, and turned down invitations to serve on many others. Professor Sterling has been particularly active in professional societies, This has been acknowledged by being made a Fellow of both IEAust and ACS. He is also currently President of Computing Research and Education (CORE), and is building links with the ACM. Leon Sterling has an impressive record in research training, having graduated over eighteen Ph.D. students in fourteen years, 19 Masters students, and supervised many honours students.

Moshe Sniedovich University of Melbourne Australia Moshe is a Reader at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the University of Melbourne. He obtained his BSc from the Technion (Israel, 1968) and his PhD from the University of Arizona (USA, 1976). Prior to joining the University of Melbourne in 1989, he worked for the CSIR (South Africa, 1979-89), IBM (USA, 1977/9), and Princeton University (1976/7). His research interests are in the areas of sequential decision making, composite optimization and interactive computing and modelling, and water resources planning. He published one book and over eighty five articles and developed numerous web-based tutorial modules for applied mathematics and operations research subjects. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals and is a member of the executive committee of the Australian Society for Operations research (ASOR). He recently served as Vice President (Representing the Asia Pacific region) of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS,1998-2003). He has served on the program committees of numerous international conferences and workshops.