TURNING OPTIMISATION INTO IMPACT
Featuring Christina Burt from Fortescue and Pascal Van Hentenryck from Gurobi, our keynote speakers bring world-leading expertise from industry and academia to explore the latest advances in optimisation and decision-making.
Pascal Van Hentenryck is the director of the US National Science
Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT),
the head of AI Innovation at Gurobi Optimization, and the A. Russell
Chandler III Chair and Professor in ISyE at Georgia Tech. He was a
professor of Computer Science at Brown University for over 20 years,
led the optimization research group at the National ICT Research in
Australia, and was a professor in IOE at the University of Michigan.
Van Hentenryck is a pioneer of constraint programming, and designed
several innovative optimization systems that have been in commercial
use for over 20 years. He has published 6 books and over 400 articles
in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, Privacy, Power
Systems, and Supply Chains. He is a fellow of AAAI and INFORMS, and
the recipients of two honorary degrees and numerous awards. His
current research focuses on fusing AI and Optimization for Engineering
with primary applications in energy systems, supply chains, and
manufacturing.
Dr Christina Burt leads a team of 6 Optimisation Specialists in Fortescue as a part of the wider AI program. She has developed a specialisation in decomposition algorithms over three postdocs at MASCOS, AIT (Vienna) and the University of Melbourne (Computing Science). She transitioned to industry with a London-based AI startup Satalia, before moving to Water Corporation (Perth) where her optimisation initiatives have enduring impact and are saving millions of dollars each year. She has been with Fortescue for 5 years, where she has developed in production solutions including truck dispatch and scheduling optimisation software.
