Carla P. Gomes

 

 Home    Research Agenda    Presentations    Papers    Demos    Meetings

 IISI

Research Agenda

I'm interested in solving hard combinatorial problems, with an emphasis on planning and scheduling problems, combining techniques form Computer Science (CS), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Operations Reserach (OR). Currently my work has focused on studying the role of randomization in computation, characterization of the distribution profiles of randomized algorithms and consequences for algorithm design. In this work, I study so-called heavy-tailed distributions that characterize complete randomized search methods. A promising way of exploiting heavy-tailed behavior is by using restart strategies or by combining a suite of search methods into a portfolio, running on a distributed compute cluster. It can be shown that such strategies dramatically reduce the expected overall computational cost, thereby allowing us to solve large, previously unsolved planning and scheduling problems. Using a recent equipment grant, we are constructing a 150 node compute cluster with a high-speed communication network to further evaluate and study our randomized approaches.

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  A pictorial view of my research interests.

Research statement  Postscript PDF    [ Brief-synopsis]

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes) American Association for the Advancement of Science(AAAS) - Annual Meeting (2005):

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  Check the Science News article by Ivars Peterson "Completing Latin Squares"

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  Science Daily (1999)  gives a journalistic view of Heavy-tailed phenomena.

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  Creating Intelligence gives a nice overview of AI at Cornell.

I'm in the process of organizing some information for this web site on the following issues (for a sneak preview):

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  Quasigroup Completion Problem - A Structured Benchmark Domain

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  Heavy-Tailed Phenomena in Combinatorial Search

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  Algorithm Portfolio Design

pr_ball.gif (238 bytes)  Planning and Scheduling