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PATAT 2012: Practioners Welcome

The PATAT (Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling) conference officially started today, although there was a social event yesterday. One of the innovative aspects of PATAT, which is reflected in the conference title, is that it attracts both academics and practitioners. The 2012 conference (the ninth in the conference series) has probably attracted more practitioners […]

PATAT 2012 Conference

I am just about to head off to the PATAT 2012 conference. This year it is in Oslo which would normally be a short hop from the UK but when you live in Malaysia it is a 15 hour flight! This is the 9th PATAT (Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling) conference in the series, […]

PATAT 2010: Googlemaps and Multimaps

In an earlier PATAT conference blog I described the multi-objective methodology that I used. I finished by saying that in basing any methodology on travel distances between football clubs you have to somehow calcuate the distances between all the clubs (or at least those in the same division). When I first started collecting all this […]

PATAT 2010: Multi-objective Sports (Football) Scheduling

At the recent PATAT (8th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling) conference I was fortunate enough to be invited to give a plenary presentation. My talk focussed on sports scheduling. Indeed, the title was “Scheduling Football (Soccer) Fixtures: Progress Made to Date and Future Challenges“. I focussed on the conflicting objectives […]

Summer Conferences

It’s been a busy couple of weeks as I have been attending two scientific conferences. Last week I was at the PATAT (Practise and Theory of Automated Timetabling) conference in Belfast and I have just returned from the IEEE Conference on Computational Inetlligence in Games (CIG 2010) in Copenhagen. Both conferences consider very different areas […]

Bin Packing Made Easier?

I have always found the following example interesting. I remember that it was Peter Ross who first showed me this during a presentation at a conferenec we were both attending. The example demonstrates that an algorithm can act in an unexpected way when you make a very small change to the input data. The example […]