Bio

Pascal Van Hentenryck is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor at Georgia Tech and the director of the NSF Artificial Intelligence Institute for Advances in Optimization. Prior to this appointment, he was a professor of Computer Science at Brown University for about 20 years, he led the optimization research group (about 70 people) at National ICT Australia (NICTA) (until its merger with CSIRO), and was the Seth Bonder Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Van Hentenryck received his undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Namur in Belgium, while doing research at the European Computer-Industry Research Centre in Munich, Germany. Van Hentenryck is also an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University.

Van Hentenryck is a Fellow of AAAI (the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science). He has been awarded two honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Louvain and the university of Nantes, the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer Award, the Philip J. Bray Award for teaching excellence in the physical sciences at Brown University, the ACP Award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming, the ICS INFORMS Prize for Research Excellence at the Intersection of Computer Science and Operations Research, the 2021 Teaching Excellence Award for Online Teaching, Georgia Institute of Technology, the 2020 Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award at Georgia Tech, an NSF National Young Investigator Award and a Ulam Fellowship from Los Alamos National Laboratories. He received a Test of Time Award (20 years) from the Association of Logic Programming and numerous best paper awards, including at IJCAI and AAAI. Van Hentenryck has given plenary/semi-plenary talks at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (twice), the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, the SIAM Optimization Conference, the Annual INFORMS Conference, NeurIPS, the IISE Annual Conference, and many other conferences.

Van Hentenryck’s research focuses in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Operations Research. His current focus is to develop methodologies, algorithms, and systems for addressing challenging problems in mobility, energy systems, resilience, and privacy. In the past, his research focused on optimization and the design and implementation of innovative optimization systems, including the CHIP programming system (a Cosytec product), the foundation of all modern constraint programming systems and the optimization programming language OPL (now an IBM Product). He led the RITMO project in mobility, trying to re-invent public transit to address the first/last mile problem, congestion, and accessibility issues and managed the Grid Research for Good project to develop tools and test cases for the energy sector. His research on resilience has been deployed to help Federal agencies in several countries. Van Hentenryck has also worked on computational biology, numerical analysis, and programming languages, publishing in premier journals in these areas. Van Hentenryck has probably written over 1,000,000 of C/C++ in his life.