Professor Freuder is an Emeritus Professor in UCC and maintains a role in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of AAAS, AAAI and EurAI. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his Ph.D. from MIT. He received the IJCAI-20 Award for Research Excellence. He has received both the Research Excellence Award and the Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Constraint Programming, and was the founding editor-in-chief of the Constraints journal. He served as a Councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Professor Freuder views his research as helping computers to help people make better decisions. He works in artificial intelligence, specialising in constraint-based reasoning. Constraint-based reasoning looks at choices. Often, as in the case of scheduling matches at a sports club or surgical procedures in a hospital, choices have to be made subject to restrictions on what combinations of choices are possible. How many sports fields, how many teams, how much daylight in winter? The Sudoku puzzle is a toy example, but many practical problems can be solved with constraint reasoning methods, including those that involve optimising some criteria, for example minimising costs, or coping with uncertainty. Professor Freuder is focusing on making this technology ever more usable, which can be a scientific challenge in its own right. In particular, he is interested in how people explain their problems to computers and computers explain their solutions (or failures) to people.
Link to personal website: https://freuder.wordpress.com
