I am a Professor at the Université catholique de Louvain and head of the beCool Constraints Group. I am a member of the Louvain School of Engineering and of the Institute for Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics.

My current interest are in Artificial Intelligence, Constraint Programming (CP), Constraint-Based Local Search (CBLS), Optimization, Constraint Satisfaction, Modeling, Consistency techniques, Operational Research, Local search, Search techniques, Heuristics, Applications.

Short bio

I received an an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Namur (Belgium)  in 1983 and a doctoral degree from the same university in 1987.  I also spent one year at Syracuse University (USA), supported by a BAEF fellowship,  where I got an MS degree in computer science in 1986.  This I received the IBM Belgium Computer Science Award for my Ph.D. Thesis on logic program construction.  From 1983 to 2001, my research were supported by the Belgium National Fund for Scientific Research.  In 1991, I came to the Department of Computing Science and Enginnering of the University of Louvain in 1991, as a Professor.  I became full Professor in 2001. 

From September 2002 to August 2003, I was in Sabbatical; I visited the Bioinformatics Research Centre (Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow), and the Service de Conformation des Macromolécules Biologiques et de Bioinformatique (Université Libre de Bruxelles).
From September 2009 to August 2010, I was in Sabbatical.  I visited the Optimization Lab of Pascal Van Hentenryck (Brown University, US).