PhD, LEL
Professor, Industrial Engineering
Email: jcb@mie.utoronto.ca
Tel: 416-946-8854
Office: BA8126
Research Group: Toronto Intelligent Decision Engineering Laboratory (TIDEL)
Research Areas
Information Engineering
Operations Research
Applied Machine Learning
Research Interests
Optimization; heuristic search; constraint programming; scheduling; hybrid algorithms; dynamic and uncertain problems; problem modeling.
Bio
J. Christopher Beck is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto in 1999 on the topic of knowledge-based heuristic search algorithms for constraint-directed scheduling. Chris then spent three years on the Scheduler Team at ILOG, SA (now part of IBM) in Paris, France, developing industrial constraint-directed scheduling software. He then was a Staff Scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland. Since 2004, he has been at the University of Toronto. Professor Beck’s research interests continue to include scheduling, heuristic search, and constraint programming but have widened to include hybrid optimization combining mixed-integer programming and constraint programming, constraint integer programming, optimization under uncertainty, queueing theory, online algorithms, and multi-agent negotiation for coupled combinatorial optimization problems.
