I am a Professor of Computer Science and Operational Research with the Computational Optimisation and Learning (COL) Lab (formerly known as ASAP research group), investigating the interaction between data science (DS) and optimization (O), and carrying out multi-disciplinary research with impact in mind into intelligent systems that can automatically aid the design and implementation of more efficient, effective, reusable, easier-to-implement/deploy/use general computational search methods that are applicable to a range of real-world problems.

I have been involved in a variety of multi-disciplinary projects cutting across Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Operational Research, and some of the selected industrial partners are as follows.

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If you are a self-funded PhD student and interested in doing a PhD, please drop me an email providing information on your background and proposal for your PhD research. I have a couple of remaining availability for PhD supervision.

Recent News

• COL Lab organised the online NATCOR training on "Heuristics and Approximation Algorithms". [see the news]
• The Metaheuristics Summer School (MESS 2020) on "Learning and Optimization from Big Data" is postponed to 2021. I have been serving serve as a director for this training course and Isaac Triguero of COL is a workshop chair.
• Alexander Steenson produced an academic paper from his final year project that I supervised entitled "An Online Learning Selection Hyper-heuristic for Educational Timetabling", which is accepted for inclusion in the PATAT 2021 proceedings and presentation at the conference.
• The 13th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling conference (PATAT 2020) that COL is involved is postponed to August 2021. I am the executive officer of the PATAT conference series and an organiser of PATAT 2021.
• New partnership between the Universities of Nottingham and Strathclyde and pharmaceutical company GSK to accelerate drug discovery starts. [see the news]
• The demo of the mock-up 3D Packing Research Application Tool (3DPackRAT) is ready on YouTube. 3DPackRAT has been developed as a collaboration between the 3D Printing Research Group (3DPRG) and the Automated Scheduling and Planning Research Group (ASAP) at the University of Nottingham. This is a "3D Printing Production Planning (3DPPP): reactive manufacturing execution driving re-distributed manufacturing" feasibility study exploring an integrated build volume packing and scheduling tool to optimise the work flow in industrial 3D Printing.

Previous Affiliations

Yeditepe University (TR) Faculty of Engineering and Architecture Computer Engineering Department AR+Ificial Intelligence Laboratory

Syracuse University (USA) L.C. College of Engineering and Computer Science Computer and Information Science Department