June 17, 2024
12:50-14:00
free
Louvain-la-Neuve
BARB 92 - Place Sainte Barbe
by Pr. Jean-Charles Régin
In this talk, we focus on text generation under strong constraints. We show that a good approach is to see this problem as a combinatorial problem of words constituting meaningful sentences. It is not possible to lose the meaning of a sentence during solving, otherwise too many unacceptable sentences are generated. To overcome this, we proceed in two stages. First, we integrate n-gram structures into the generation process. Then we use madel languages to associate scores with sentences and retain only the best. Our approach is implemented to generate sentences in the context of a medical reading test.
Pr. Régin is an internationally recognized expert of Constraint Programming (CP).
Innovation and ground-breaking research are a constancy in his career and his contributions are recognized internationally in the academic and non-academic worlds. He is one of the inventors of the global constraints in CP (i.e. algorithms to quickly eliminate incoherent values). His paper describing the All different global constraint is highly cited (> 1000 cit.). This constraint is now implementing in almost all CP solvers and routinely used in many applications by companies such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Google or SAS. The cited article, published in 1994, received the "Classical Paper Award" in 2013 from the American Association on Artificial Intelligence: ''For ground-breaking contributions to constraint programming via the development of one of the first propagators for global constraints.''. In 2013, he received the Association for Constraint Programming Research Excellence Award ''in recognition of a program of seminal and outstanding scientific contributions to both the theory and practice of constraint programming''.
JC Régin introduced operations research-based filtering algorithms in CP by integrating matching and flow algorithms in propagator algorithms. A relevant example is his paper about the Generalized Cardinality Constraints (~ 500 citations).
He pioneered soft global constraints for dealing with over-constrained problems and proposed an efficient way for modelling such problems. He established statistics-based constraints.
He also invented a new parallelism method for CP, the Embarrassingly Parallel Search, a nonintrusive and successful method that integrated into solvers as the new default method of parallelism.
He proposed several filtering algorithms for enforcing arc consistency for generic constraints (also called table constraint). In 2022, one of his papers on this subject received the Artificial Intelligence Journal classic paper award: "The hallmarks of this work are its elegance, simplicity, efficiency and impact". Recently, he has developed new algorithms for performing operations on Multi-valued Decision Diagrams based on their graph structure and thereby gained several orders of magnitude in time. These algorithms open up new possibilities for research and enable certain problems to be modelled very differently. Interesting successes, notably with F. Pachet (Sony), have been achieved in automatic music generation.
JC Régin obtained the "Decision Intelligence" chair at The 3IA center in Nice in 2019. This chair aims at designing explainable decision-making processes satisfying real world constraints in a multi-objective environment including incomplete, fuzzy or stochastic data.
His work nourished from the academic environment as well as from the several cooperation projects that I have been involved in and from the collaborations with the private sector (Microsoft, Google, Amadeus, Sony…). For twelve years, he managed a worldwide recognized R&D team that designed of one the best CP based solvers for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Beyond the public sector, his career is strongly linked to the private sector as he worked on many real-world applications for a variety of companies. During his career, He has been strongly involved in dissemination activities related to his field of research. In 2004, He created, organized and chaired the first international CP-AI-OR conference. This year will be the 20th edition of this conference.
Pay attention : Sandwiches will be provided, please fill in the form before day D at 09:00 to reserve a sandwich