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

I am currently Senior Advisor to the President for the Digital University at UCLouvain. I also head the steering committee of the information system at UCLouvain.

In research, I belong to the Artificial Intelligence and Algorithm research group.

My current research 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.  I received the IBM Belgium Computer Science Award for my Ph.D. Thesis on logic program construction.  From 1983 to 1991, my research was supported by the Belgium National Fund for Scientific Research.  In 1991, I came to the Department of Computing Science and Engineering of the Université catholique de Louvain in 1991, as a Professor.  I became full Professor in 2001. 

In my sabbatical 2002-2003, I visited the Bioinformatics Research Centre in the Department of Computing Science (University of Glasgow), and the Service de Conformation des Macromolécules Biologiques et de Bioinformatique (Université Libre de Bruxelles). In my sabbatical 2009-2010, I visited the Optimization Lab at the Computer Science Department at Brown University.

At UCL, I headed the Commission des programmes informatique as well as the Computer Science department. I was in the editorial board of the Constraint journal, and I was a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Constraint Programming, 2011-2014.




short CV