Combinatorial Solving with Provably Correct Results: from SAT to MaxSAT (and Beyond?) 
November 24, 2024, Klagenfurt, Austria
Invited Talk at Workshop on Trends and Applications of Answer Set Programming (TAASP)
Personal Profile
I'm a research professor in the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence section of the KU Leuven. My research interests are spread throughout the field of knowledge representation. They range from high-level representation languages to performance optimisations in SAT, from abstract, algebraical frameworks to unify semantics of logics to implementation of knowledge base systems, from applications of KR to integration of declarative problem solving paradigms,... My current focus is developing mechanisms that instill trust in solving technology by means of proofs. This is the core topic of my ERC grant.
I am also partially affiliated to the AI lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
News
FWO Research project "ProToX: From Proofs to Explanations (and Back Again)" awarded. Expect to see a vacancy soon!
Daimy van Caudenberg won the BrEA student prize for best master thesis in computer science for her work on enumerating solutions of the Yang-Baxter Equation.
Dieter Vandesande obtains a prestigious FWO Aspirant Fundamental Resarch fellowship.
Dieter Vandesande is runner up for the VCLA Outstanding Master Thesis Award.
Robbe van den Eede obtains best paper award at LPNMR 2024 for his work on proof systems for inductive definitions.
Selected Talks
Combinatorial Solving with Provably Correct Results: from SAT to MaxSAT (and Beyond?)
Combinatorial Solving with Provably Correct Results 
February 20, 2024, Vancouver, Canada
Tutorial at The 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024)
Combinatorial Solving with Provably Correct Results
August 20, 2023, Macao, S.A.R.
Tutorial at the 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
Certified Static and Dynamic Symmetry Breaking 
April 20, 2023, Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, USA
Combinatorial Solving with Provably Correct Results
November 29, 2022, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (Virtual)
On Symmetries and Certification
October 13, 2022, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany
Dagstuhl seminar on Theory and Practice of SAT and Combinatorial Solving
Solving with Provably Correct Results: Beyond Satisfiability, and Towards Constraint Programming
August 2, 2022, Haifa, Israel
The IDP System: What and Why?
October 25, 2021, Virtual Conference
A framework for step-wise explaining how to solve constraint satisfaction problems
April 24, 2021, Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, California, USA
Step-Wise Explanations for Constraint Satisfaction (and Optimization?)
September 7, 2020, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.
Approximation Fixpoint Theory and its Application to Knowledge Representation
Januari 15, 2019, Leipzig, Germany.
Symmetry Exploitation for Combinatorial Problems
November 6, 2017, Stockholm, Sweden.
Propagators and Solvers for the Algebra of Modular Systems
October 17, 2016, New York, USA.
International Workshop on Logic and Search (Lash 2016)
Lazy Model Expansion: Interleaving Grounding with Search
July 18, 2014, Vienna, Austria.
International Workshop on Logic and Search (Lash 2014)
Awards and Prices
2024 SAT Competition
Main Track SAT: second place
2023 SAT Competition
Honorary medal
AAAI 2022
Distinguished paper award
IJCAI 2021
Distinguished paper award
2019 Holy Grail Challenge
First place
2016 QBFEval
Prenex CNF: Second place
2016 SAT Competition
No Limits Track: First place
2013 SAT Competition
Core Solvers, Sequential, Hard-combinatorial SAT+UNSAT: First place
Core Solvers, Sequential, Hard-combinatorial SAT: Third place
PhD Students
Maxime Jakubowski
May 2024, Joint PhD UHasselt-VUB
Shapes Constraint Language: Formalization, Expressiveness, and Provenance
Emilio Gamba
May 2024, Joint PhD VUB-KU Leuven
Step-Wise Explanations for Constraint Solving
Simon Marynissen
January 2022, Joint PhD KU Leuven-VUB
Advances in Justification Theory
Software
I have (co)-authored the following software: ZebraTutor, IDP3, MinisatID, BreakID, so2grounder, SmsControl.