Dr Christopher Mears - Researcher Profile

Biography

Chris completed his Bachelor of Software Engineering (Honours) in 2005 and in the same year received a Vice-Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Scholarship. The decision to continue on with his studies was made during the final year of his study.

I enjoyed the taste of research during my studies in the honours program and wanted to continue this further. My area of interest is constraint programming and combinatorial optimisation. If asked to explain this to someone in one sentence, my answer would be: 'we aim to solve difficult combinatorial problems that occur in such areas as logistics and scheduling, more efficiently by exploiting their symmetries.'

Another factor for choosing Monash to continue my passion in research was due to the familiarity and confidence of the research staff. My research degree gave me the opportunity to travel across the world to attend conferences and meet other researchers in the field.

Research & Supervision Interests

I am interested in solving difficult combinatorial problems, such as those in transportation, scheduling, and bioinformatics. I have done research in detecting and exploiting symmetry in constraint programming to make solving these problems easier, and my current work is in finding other ways of making constraint solving faster with caching and problem re-modeling.

Qualifications

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Institution: Monash University

Year awarded: 2010

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Institution: Monash University

Year awarded: 2006

Publications

Journal Articles

Mears, C.D., Garcia De La Banda, M.J., Wallace, M., 2009, On implementing symmetry detection, Constraints [P], vol 14, issue 4, Springer, Dordrecht GZ Netherlands, pp. 443-477.

Conference Proceedings

Mears, C., Niven, T., Jackson, M., Wallace, M., 2011, Proving symmetries by model transformation, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, 12 September 2011 to 16 September 2011, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Germany, pp. 591-605.

Chu, G., Stuckey, P., Garcia De La Banda, M., Mears, C., 2011, Symmetries and lazy clause generation, Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16 July 2011 to 22 July 2011, AAAI Press/International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park CA USA, pp. 516-521.

Mears, C., Niven, T., 2010, Proving symmetries by model transformation, Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Constraint Modelling and Reformulation, 06 September 2010, Uppsala University, Uppsala Sweden, pp. 1-15.

Chu, G., Garcia De La Banda, M.J., Mears, C.D., Stuckey, P.J., 2010, Symmetries and lazy clause generation, Proceedings of SymCon'10 the Tenth International Workshop on Symmetry in Constraint Satisfaction Problems, 06 September 2010, Uppsala University, Uppsala Sweden, pp. 1-15.

Mears, C.D., Garcia De La Banda, M.J., Wallace, M., Demoen, B., 2008, A novel approach for detecting symmetries in CSP models, Lecture Notes In Artificial Intelligence, 20/05/2008-23/05/2008, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Germany, pp. 158-172.

Mears, C.D., Garcia De La Banda, M.J., Demoen, B., Wallace, M., 2008, Lightweight dynamic symmetry breaking, Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Symmetry in Constraint Satisfaction Problems, 14 September 2008 to 18 September 2008, SymCon'08, http://www.aloul.net/symcon/proceedings.html, pp. 1-10.

Mears, C.D., Garcia De La Banda, M.J., Wallace, M., Demoen, B., 2008, Symmetry breaking and branching constraints, Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Symmetry in Constraint Satisfaction Problems, 14 September 2008 to 18 September 2008, SymCon'08, http://www.aloul.net/symcon/proceedings.html, pp. 1-6.

Demoen, B., Garcia De La Banda, M.J., Mears, C.D., Wallace, M., 2007, A novel approach for detecting symmetries in CSP models, Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Symmetry in Constraint Satisfaction Problems, 23 September 2007 to 27 September 2007, SymCon'07, http://www.cmi.univ-mrs.fr/~benhamou/symcon07/Proceedings%20.htm, pp. 30-38.

Cao, M.D., Dix, T.I., Allison, L., Mears, C.D., 2007, A simple statistical algorithm for biological sequence compression, Proceedings of the 2007 Data Compression Conference, 27 March 2007 to 29 March 2009, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos CA USA, pp. 43-52.