Research interest:

• Linear Programming (Modelling and solving)
• Constraints Programming (Modeling, search, global constraints)
• Pattern mining (itemset mining, interval pattern mining, pattern set mining)
• Metaheuristics (Local search, search strategies, hybridization, parallelism)

An overview about my current research:

I am working on new approaches to carry Data Mining (DM) tasks such as clustering, pattern mining or pattern sampling under constraints, where a user can use additional knowledge to guide the search process. This field requires the development of hybrid methods ranging from Operation Research (OR), Constraints Programming (CP), and dedicated DM methods.

I am also working on the development of new variants for the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) method to solve Weighted Constraint Satisfaction Problems (WCSP). I am interested in the design of parallel hybrid methods which combine local and complete search while maintaining a tradeoff between time and quality.

Selected list of publications:

• A. Ouali et al, Variable neighborhood search for graphical model energy minimization, Artificial Intelligence Journal, 2020.
• A. Ouali et al, Integer Linear Programming for Pattern Set Mining; with an Application to Tiling, PAKDD 2017, South Korea.
• A. Ouali, S. Loudni, Y. Lebbah, P. Boizumault, A. Zimmermann, and L. Loukil. Efficiently Finding Conceptual Clustering Models with Integer Linear Programming. IJCAI 2016, USA.

Participations to International Program Committees:

• AAAI (Conference on Artificial Intelligence): 2021, 2023, 2024
• IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence): 2020, 2023, 2024.
• ECAI (European Conference on Artificial Intelligence): 2023, 2024.
• ECML-PKDD (European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases) 2022, 2023.

Participations to Program Committees of National Conferences:

• JFPC (Journées Francophones de Programmation par Contraintes): 2021->2023.
• CSA (Computing Systems and Applications): 2024.
• RJCIA (Rencontres des Jeunes Chercheurs en Intelligence Artificielle): 2019.

Responsabilities:

• Coordinator of the track Data Science for Master of Computer Science. University of Caen.

Current classes in french for bachelor's degree:

• Functional Programming: Haskell
• Decision making and Artificial intelligence: Constraint Programming
• Databases: Relational algebra, SQL and Mysql

Current classes in french for master degree:

• Constraint Programming and Linear Programming: LP Modeling, Simplex, Duality, CSP Modeling, Advanced search methods and filtering algorithms
• Structuring and control of decision support process: continuous optimization (gradient)
• Declarative approaches for pattern mining: Constraint Programming and Linear Programming for solving Pattern Mining problems

Student material in French can be found on Moodle (e-campus platform) of the University of Caen.

Click here for more details about my teaching activities.

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