Technical Advisory Board

Yves Deville
Professor, Computing Science and Engineering
Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Yves Deville 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. He also spent one year at Syracuse University (USA), supported by a BAEF fellowship, where he obtained his MS degree in computer science in 1986. He received the IBM Belgium Computer Science Award for his research on logic program construction, and from 1983 to 2001,  was supported by the Belgium National Fund for Scientific Research. He joined the department of Computing Science and Engineering of the Université catholique de Louvain as a professor in 1991, and became a full professor in 2001.  He has completed research in bioinformatics (more particularly the modelization and analysis of biochemical networks), and he is currently focusing on artificial intelligence, Constraint Programming (CP), and Constraint-Based Local Search (CBLS).  Specific topics include graphs in CP and CBLS, global constraints, hybridation of CP and CBLS, constraints and bioinformatics, constraint-based methods for subgraph pattern matching, very large-scale neighborhood search techniques in CBLS, and CP and CBLS approaches for scheduling and other applications.

Michel Goemans
Leighton Family Professor of Applied Mathematics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Michel Goemans is the Leighton Familty Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a faculty member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the MIT Operations Research Center (ORC). He has held an Adjunct Professorship at the University of Waterloo, a Professorship at the University of Louvain and a visiting Professorship at RIMS, Kyoto.  His research in discrete algorithms and combinatorial optimization has been awarded several prizes, in particular the 2000 AMS-MPS Fulkerson Prize and twice the SIAM Optimization prize. He has spoken at numerous industry conferences, and has been on the program committee of several major theoretical computer science conferences, including as chair of the 2003 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. In addition to being a Guggenheim Fellow, Sloan Foundation Fellow, and ACM Fellow, Michel was also a Fellow at Akamai Technologies where he designed and led the development of their next-generation load balancing algorithms.

George Nemhauser
Professor, Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

George L. Nemhauser was educated at the Bronx High School of Science, City College of New York (B.Ch.E. 1958) and Northwestern University (M.S. 1959, Ph.D. 1961).  He joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University as Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering in 1961. In 1970, he was appointed Professor of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at Cornell University and Leon Welch Professor in 1984. He served as School Director during the period 1977 - 1983. He joined Georgia Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 1985 as the A. Russell Chandler Professor and was appointed Institute Professor in 1991. He has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Leeds, U.K. the University of Louvain, Belgium and the Univeristy of Melbourne, Australia. At Louvain he worked at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics and was Research Director for 2 years.  His principal research interests are in the area of discrete optimization. He is the author of 3 books and more than 100 papers. He has supervised more than 50 doctoral dissertations. His current interests are in solving large-scale mixed integer programming problems and he is actively working on several real world problems, especially the application of discrete optimization in logistics and transportation. He is one of the developers of MINTO, a software system for solving mixed-integer programs.  His honors include membership in the National Academy of Engineering, Kimball medal and Lanchester prize (twice), Morse lecturer of ORSA, distinguished alumnus awards from Northwestern and outstanding teaching awards at Johns Hopkins.  He has served ORSA as Council Member, President and Editor of Operations Research. He was the founding Editor of Operations Research Letters and of the Handbooks of Operations Research and Management Science. He is the Past Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society.  He has served various government agencies including NSF, NIST and NRC. He is a member of the Sports Scheduling Group, which provides schedules for several NCAA member conferences and major league baseball, and is also a member of the Technical Advisory Board of CombineNet.

Rama Ramakrishnan
Senior Lecturer
MIT Sloan School of Management

Rama joins MIT from price optimization software firm ProfitLogic, where he was Chief Scientist and VP of R&D.  While at ProfitLogic, Rama pioneered the development of techniques for optimally pricing and promoting seasonal and fashion-sensitive merchandise for retailers. By combining elements of consumer psychology, econometric modeling, data mining and optimization, Rama's team was able to help retailers achieve substantial financial gains in a matter of months. In recognition, Chain Store Age magazine awarded him its "40 Under 40: Rising Star of Retail" award in 2004. ProfitLogic was acquired by Oracle in July 2005. After the acquisition, Rama became Chief Scientist and Vice-President of Analytic R&D for Oracle's Retail Global Business Unit. In this role, he led a global team of engineers and scientists in the research, design and development of forecasting, planning and optimization software products for retailers. Prior to ProfitLogic, Rama was founder and principal of Profit Sciences, an analytics consulting firm, and an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, advising Global 2000 senior managers on solving strategic and operational problems using analytical techniques. Rama began his career with the Decision Technologies group of American Airlines, where he worked on building model-based solutions for a variety of airline problems. In addition to teaching at MIT Sloan, Rama advises retailers and other consumer-oriented companies on improving their performance through the judicious use of analytic technologies, and writes on optimization and analytics at The Analytic Age blog. His areas of expertise include customer-centric analytics, demand forecasting, pricing, promotions, assortment planning, inventory allocation and replenishment. Rama has a B.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.