The Toronto Intelligent Decision Engineering Laboratory
people / J. Christopher Beck


I joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto in August, 2004. I am a Professor in the area of Information Engineering but also do a lot of what might be considered Operations Research.

Before joining U of T I spent 2 years as a Staff Scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland. I spent 3 years as Senior Scientist and Software Engineer on the Scheduler R&D team at ILOG in Paris, France.

I have done two sabbatical visits: 2010-11 at the Zuse Institute, Berlin and 2017-18 at King's College London.

I do research in the areas of optimization, heuristic search, constraint programming, constraint-directed scheduling, AI planning, hybrid algorithms, dynamic and uncertain problems, problem modeling, and even some machine learning. Broadly, I am interested in when and why a particular problem solving technique works: what characteristics make a problem suitable (or unsuitable) for a search technique.

Here is a short CV.

Contact Information

J. Christopher Beck 
Department of Mechanical & 
Industrial Engineering
University of Toronto
5 King's College Rd.
Toronto, ON  M5S 3G8
Phone: +1 416-946-8854
Fax: +1 416 978-7753

University of Toronto Mechanical and Information Engineering