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After 6 years of working in the AI research group, I have taken up a research fellow postdoc position in the real-time and distributed systems group, specifically working on the SCHEME project (safety-critical harsh environment micro-processor evolution). I am applying many of the techniques from previous work such as feature engineering, algorithm selection, constraint programming in order to solve problems in robotics system.
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In the summer of 2025, the maths department moved in alongside computer science into the Ian Wand building. The table tennis table in our courtyard stood mostly unused, as did the table-football in the communal pod. I organised a table sports tournament to encourage people from both departments to have some fun getting to know each other over a game.
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ModRef has been an excellent venue for presenting cutting edge research, at the work in progress stage for researchers interested in constraint programming. As a PhD student, I found it a valuable stepping stone, enabling me to polish and improve my work before submitting it for publication.
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Glasgow, here we come! It was very exciting to be a co-author on two papers accepted to CP2025 in Glasgow. One paper presents a constraint model used by the European Southern Observatory to schedule observations on its very large telescope system. The other paper uses the Klondike solitaire game to showcase some modelling techniques and some CP-based algorithm scheduling approaches.
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I’ve enjoyed solving the LinkedIn Queens puzzle most mornings since they introduced it earlier this year. The problem requires the player to place the queens on a board according to a very brief set of constraints (or rules). For a bit of fun, I wanted to solve the puzzle automatically (or as close as possible) using constraint programming.
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It was a wonderful occasion to reflect on and celebrate the PhD experience with colleagues at a very special graduation ceremony organised by the University of York. Having missed my original BSc graduation back in 2000, it was great to finally wear the gown and receive the award on stage. I will always be grateful to all those people who made it possible for me to enage in these years of study, training and research.
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After minor corrections, my thesis dissertation was approved and is now live at the White Rose E-theses Repository. This completes a very eventful, challenging and rewarding 5 years since stepping out of my career as a school teacher to pursue a long-held ambition to learn more and engage in cutting edge research. I am very grateful to my supervisors for all their help and to my family for all their support.
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I’m getting the chance to be back at the front of a class! I’ve been employed as a part-time lecturer, in order to teach part of a Masters level course on AI: Problem Solving with Search here at the University of York. I will be co-teaching with the module leader, and it involves everything from writing lectures, labs and quizzes to setting, marking and moderating the exams.
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Our paper Learning to select SAT Encodings for pseudo-Boolean and linear integer constraints has now been published in the Constraints journal. This paper was an extended version of the work presented at CP2022, with more encodings, more analysis and the first detailed description of Savile Row’s Tree SAT encoding.
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Four eventful years after stepping out of school as a teacher back into university as a student I submitted by PhD Thesis on the topic of Learning SAT Encodings for Constraint Satisfaction Problems. What a relief! I’m looking forward to picking up some of the research projects which were on hold while the write-up was completed. And of course awaiting the viva!
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After completing the York Professional and Academic Development scheme (YPAD) and submitting a report of my teaching-related experience I was awarded Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. As part of my report I carried out a brief investigation into using summative assessment results to inform teaching and assessment in the next cohort. Per-question breakdown of the marks allows some rudimentary statistical analysis which can shed light on how questions could be improved or which concepts and skills might be particularly difficult for students.
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It was good fun to submit an optimisation problem to the CSPLib web site. This was a real-life problem (or opportunity?) to use some discarded planks of wood to build a set of bookshelves. The idea was to create some bookshelves which would accommodate books of a mininum height and would maximise the shelf space given the collection of planks I was left with.
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I was very honoured to receive the “Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year” award after “GTA-ing” in a number of contexts, both in-person and remotely during the pandemic.