CWI researcher Karen Aardal has been appointed part-time professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology. As of April 1, 2005, she holds the chair of Combinatorial Algorithmics at the Department of Mathematics and Computer science. She will study algorithms for 'combinatorial and integer optimization problems'. Examples are frequency assignment problems in mobile communication and routing problems in logistics. In particular she will try to strengthen the link between algorithms research in computer science and discrete optimization in mathematics.
Karen Aardal works as a senior researcher at CWI in the Networks and Logic - Optimization and Programming (PNA1) research group, since March 15, 2004. At CWI, she studies algebraic methods for integer programming. Methods developed by her and various co-workers make it possible to solve some difficult classes of integer programming problems such as the 'market split problems'. Their name stems from the situation that an oil company wanted to split its gas stations into two divisions such that each division received exactly 50% of the market share. It is practically impossible to check all possible combinations of assignment of stations to divisions, but with the new method a scaling effect is obtained that makes a solution possible.
More information can be found on PNA1's website or Karen Aardal's homepage
