Projects
Current collaborations
With Th. Sarkodie-Gyan (UTEP, USA)
Since January 2005, we have been collaborating in the area of bio-engineering. The objective of our main project
is to design an intelligent system for gait therapy. We are actively pursuing funding opportunities, and we recently
were approached by Boeing and NASA's Johnson Space Center for collaboration. A contract is pending.
With F. Modave (UTEP, USA)
Since August 2003, we have been working on combining multi-criteria decision making techniques
and interval computations. More precisely, we deal with handling the user's uncertainty about
the importance of the criteria, using intervals. This involves the definition of strategies to
decide among interval alternatives (more or less safety-oriented strategies for instance).
Moreover, we also want to enrich this model such as to be able to process information of a
different kind, such as, for instance, probability distributions.
We also work on applications of these interval MCDM techniques to areas such as security.
With S. Bistarelli (Italy)
I am working with Stefano, co-advising one of my graduate students, Christian Servin, in his master's thesis work.
The objective of this work is to design a method to detect and fix cascade vulnerability problems in networks.
Past joint projects
With H. Hosobe and K. Satoh (NII, Japan), W. Ueno (Waseda Univ.,
Japan), F. Benhamou and C. Jermann (LINA, France)
This project was about flexible constraints (or soft constraints). It involved researchers from
France (Laboratoire d'Informatique de Nantes Atlantique, Nantes) and from Japan (National
Institute of Informatics, Tokyo).
Flexible constraints, unlike classical constraints (conditions that solutions must meet), are
condition that are likely not to be satisfiable. Violation of conditions is allowed
in the case of flexible constraints. But because conditions are no longer crisp, there is
room for many different interpretations. Working on flexible therefore means understanding how
flexibility can be considered.
Much work has yet been dedicated to this problem. Several framework were proposed. The aim of this
project was to design a soft constraint solver, based on traditional (interval) constraint and
optimization solvers, and to apply it to graphical interfaces problems. Our starting point was
centered on hierarchical constraints, that Hiroshi Hosobe (one of the Japanese researcher of NII
involved in this project) already used for graphical interfaces purposes.
Originally, this project was a 2-year French-Japanese project (PAI-Egide Sakura, started in
January 2004), whose French team was composed of Frederic Benhamou and myself. Later on,
Christophe Jermann joined the LINA's
constraint team, and I came to UTEP. Hence, I became an external collaborator, until the end of 2005.
With Linet Ozdamar (Turkey)
Our collaboration was about designing more efficient algorithm for constraint solving using intervals. This collaboration resulted in the
publication of a journal article (cf. Publications).
Collaborators over the last 48 months
NII, Tokyo, Japan: Ken Satoh, Hiroshi Hosobe
LINA, University of Nantes, France: Frédéric Benhamou, Laurent Granvilliers,
Christophe Jermann, Brice Pajot
ESSI, University of Nice, France: Michel Rueher
Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, Pisa, Italy: Stefano Bistarelli
ESTIA, Bidart, France: Xavier Fischer
Yeditepe University, Department of Systems Engineering, Istanbul, Turkey: Linet Ozdamar
Microsoft, Cambridge, UK: Lucas Bordeaux
UTEP, El Paso, USA: Thompson Sarkodie-Gyan, Vladik Kreinovich, Pat Teller, Ann Gates, Ming-Ying Leung, François Modave,
Michela Taufer