Updates from parental leave

Since May, I have been on parental leave, caring for our first child, who was born in September 2025. Making sure the kid doesn’t do anything too stupid will remain my main work responsibility until January 2026, when the responsibility will switch to daycare personnel during working hours.

While parental leave has slowed my research progress, it hasn’t stopped it. In July, I returned to work in order to travel to Portugal to attend the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC). I mostly visited the SAT and CP conferences. The highlight of the trip was being honored with the Early Career Researcher Award by the Association for Constraint Programming.

This autumn’s research highlights so far included my PhD student Christoph Jabs defending his dissertation in September and my other student, Antton Kasslin, getting his first two papers accepted. Antton has been working on constraint-based methods for two data analysis problems: scheduling high-school classes with student preferences (paper to be presented at ALENEX-2027, and flow allocation problems that seek to even out the wastewater arriving at a water treatment plant (paper accepted in the Annals of Operations Research journal). In both cases, the work contributes not only a constraint model for the problem, but also new real-world datasets for experimentation and for community use. I am very happy with both papers and with getting to know new communities and research areas. I will make both papers available here once publication is finalized. I want to thank both Antton and representatives at both Helsinki Region Environmental Services and Kyrkslätts Gymnasium for the datasets. I would also like to congratulate Christoph on his well-deserved PhD and his excellent defense.

I will return to full-time work in February 2027.