The CompCon 2013 Committee is proud to announce our first keynote speaker, Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck!

Pascal will be speaking on Saving Lives with Computational Thinking. This talk presents a number of projects in health care and disaster management where computational thinking dramatically improves human and social welfare. It also explains why these problems are extremely challenging computationally and gives a brief overview of some of the problem-solving methodologies to approach them.

Pascal Van Hentenryck leads the Optimisation Research Group at National ICT Australia (NICTA), the centre of excellence for ICT research in Australia. Van Hentenryck is the recipient of two honorary degrees and is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He was awarded the 2002 INFORMS ICS Award for research excellence at the intersection of operations research and computer science, the 2006 ACP Award for research excellence in constrain programming, the 2010-2011 Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Brown University, and is a 2013 IFORS Distinguished speaker. Van Hentenryck is the author of five MIT Press books and has developed a number of innovative optimization systems that are widely used in academia and industry. He also teaches a successful and innovative massively online course on discrete optimization (check it out on YouTube!).

Van Hentenryck has recently been appointed to the position of Strategic Chair in Data Intensive Computing at the Australian National University.

CompCon 2013 will be held from 28-30 September 2013. Early bird registrations are still open!