Yesterday (October 25th) saw the culmination of one of my biggest projects of the year in the form of the Doctoral Program of the CP 2021 conference, which was chaired and organised by me.
The doctoral program is a full day even at the conference. The goal is to gather early-career (student) researchers in order to discuss ongoing research in a relaxed atmosphere. Additionally the DP aimed to provide opportunities for students to interact with more experienced researchers.
This year, the DP was a full day event held om 25th of October, the workshop day of the main conference. We had nine submissions from students. The program consisted of a discussion of the reviews submitted by the participants, two sessions for the participants to present their own work, and a panel discussion on presenting work with more senior researchers. The panelists were: Professor Christine Solnon from INSA de Lyon Professor Tias Guns from KU Leuven Professor Susanna de Rezende from the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague an Royal Society Research Fellow and Reader Christopher Jefferson from University of St. Andrews. The program concluded with a social session were we played codenames with the participants.
The videos of the contributions to the DP (including the panel) can be found on youtube (below). The submissions themselves can be found on Google Drive.
The recordings of the DP 2021
I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to everyone who contributed to the doctoral program, including all of the authors, the panelists and everyone who agreed to be on the program committee and provide the students with helpful comments.
While the DP is over, the conference itself is still going on. Two of my papers will still be presented today and the last one on Friday. If you’re interested you should definitely check it out, more info on the conference webpage.
During this year I have been a part of the steering group of a project called UniJunior. The aim of the project is to increase the curiosity of children in elementary school towards science and research by organising a series of interdisciplinary workshops in Swedish once per month during the fall and spring of 2021-2022. The project especially targets kids coming from non-academic homes. It is funded by Svenska Kulturfonden and Stiftelsen Brita Maria Renlunds minne.
Last Saturday the project kicked off with a workshop on colors, a workshop planned mainly be me and Christoffer Fridlund. The kids got to learn about what kind of a role color plays in different chemical reactions, how rainbows are formed by light refraction and how computers represent color as numbers. I thought the whole things went really well and—based on the feedback we collected—so did the kids!
I would especially like to thank Martina, Eva and Jim for planning, organising, and running the workshop with me and the ChemistryLab Gadolin for lending their premises and suplies for the workshop. I would also like to express my gratitude to everyone in the steering group of UniJunior, including its chair Prof. Gunilla Holm.
I am happy to let you know that I had three papers accepted at CP 2021. More details on them (as well as the full versions) can be found on on the publications page on these webpages. I would like to thank all my co-authors, especially Pavel and Hannes whose first papers these are. See you at the conference in October!
These papers also mark the beginning of my very own Academy of Finland project! I am looking forward to developing new optimisation algorithms that combine the strengths and weaknesses of many different paradigms and also work incrementally.
The results of the 2021 MaxSAT Evaluation were just announced at the 2021 SAT conference (by me :)). My solver Loandra performed very well, taking first place in the weighted 300s track and fourth in all other tracks. The source code of that version of Loandra is already available at the evaluation website and in its repository.
I would like to thank my co-organizers of the Evaluation and the organizers of the SAT conference. I am looking forward to taking a closer look at the results.
P.S, tomorrow i will be talking at the MIAO seminar about abstract cores. The talk will be recorded and put up on youtube later.
Today I received the very pleasant news of having been granted funding for my project “Next-generation Trustworthy Constraint Optimisation” from the Academy of Finland, My proposal was one of the 44 post-doctoral projects that were granted funding (11% of all applications). My term as an Academy postdoctoral researcher will start this fall and continue until 2024. The full list of funded proposals can be found here.
I would like to express my sincerest gratitude toward the Academy. I am looking forward to the opportunity of realizing my (very cool) research plan!
A week ago I gave the second talk at the Simons Institute, this time at the Theoretical Foundations of SAT/SMT Solving seminar. The event webpage can be found here. I had the opportunity to talk about my work on preprocessing for Maximum Satisfiability, covering work done both during and after the preprocessing.
I would again like to thank Marjin Heule for considering me as a speaker for the event. Next time you can hear me speak is at Jakob Nordströms video seminars on the 4.6. I will talk about Abstract Cores in the IHS algorithm for MaxSAT, covering my recent paper from SAT 2020. Looking forward to seeing you there!
This spring I have been very fortunate to have been invited to give to talks at the various different seminars run by the Simons Institute in California.
The first talk on solving MaxSAT was given on the 13th of April together with Matti Järvisalo. The talk was a part of the Beyond Satisfiability seminar, a recording of it can be found here.
The second talk will be on MaxSAT preprocessing on May 5th as a part of the Theoretical Foundation of SAT/SMT solving workshop. More information can be found here. As the talk is online. I invite anyone who is interested to attend. I am sure the talks will be interesting, personally I am looking forward to hearing about SAT and QBF preprocessing form Benjamin and Martina.
I would like to thank the organisers of the various seminars of the Simons Institute for considering me as a speaker in their events.
In the spring I was invited to join the Young Academy Finland (nuorten tiedeakatemia). My 4-year membership started this fall. The Academy is “a multidisciplinary organization for young researchers that aims to promote research and strengthen the status of science and scholarship in society“. I am exited for this opportunity and hope to be able to form meaningful contacts and have a positive impact on the state of research and especially research communication in Finland during my four year mandate.
Jeremias Berg 