When thinking about what to do with this blog there were a number of different things that came to mind. The one that I decided to actually try to implement is a series of posts attempting to explain my research to a wider audience.

Often I find that explaining my research is fairly difficult, even when discussing with other computer science researchers. I do not think this is due to the topics that I work on being very difficult, in fact I am sure there are a number of people in the world that could have developed the same results I have given the same opportunities that I have been given. Instead I think the main difficulty in explaining my contributions to the field is that they build on a large amount of previous research and results. Thus to be able to detail the contributions of a specific publication to someone without a background in the field, I first have to explain most of the work on which my publication builds on, and to do that I need to explain the work on which the previous work builds on etc.

The aim of these posts is to overview the topics necessary for understanding my research and to highlight my personal views on the topics. The long term goal is to be able to explain each of my publications. However, in order to get there, I first have to discuss a number of topics, including optimization problems, complexity theory, reductions and NP-hardness and constraint programming with an emphasis on propositional logic, SAT solving and MaxSAT solving. As the intended audience of these post are people without any background in computer science (or even any kind of natural sciences) I will simplify many of the technical details. In other words, these posts will not cover the topics thoroughly, and should be seen as an introduction that is sufficient for understanding my personal research. I will attempt to provide links to further resources on each topic.

The first post in this series with actual content will be on optimization problems. Until then!