RESEARCH PROFILE

Bart Jansen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His areas of expertise include algorithms, complexity theory, and graph theory. Bart’s research interests mainly concern parameterized (graph) algorithmics, with a special focus on provably effective preprocessing (kernelization). He is a member of NETWORKS, an NWO Gravitation project spanning multiple universities in the Netherlands. Its goal is to investigate the interplay between algorithms and stochastics to tackle complex problems on networks.

Bart’s main focus is on understanding the power of data reduction. In practice, the search for the exact solution to an NP-complete problem is often accelerated by orders of magnitude by adding a preprocessing phase. Before attempting to solve the problem, it is simplified by repeatedly applying reduction rules that do not change the answer. How can such reduction rules be developed systematically, how can we explain their success, and how can we predict estimate what types of reduction rules are useful for a certain application? These are questions that Bart attacks on a daily basis.

Investigating efficient preprocessing algorithms is like exploring the lost continent of polynomial time. For decades, researchers believed there are no polynomial-time algorithms which are guaranteed to be useful in the search for exact answers to NP-complete problems. But we’re now discovering there is a rich variety of preprocessing algorithms to be found!”

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

Bart Jansen received an MSc in Applied Computing Science from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in 2009. He received a PhD from the same university in 2013. After working for one year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen, Norway, he returned to the Netherlands to become Assistant Professor at TU/e. Bart received a VENI grant from NWO. In June 2014, Bart was awarded the Christiaan Huygens Prize in ICT.

Bart serves as co-chair of IPEC 2019 and is a program committee member of ICALP 2018, WG 2017, ESA 2016 and IPEC 2016. He is an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG), and on the Steering Committee of PACE (Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge). He has been a speaker at a wide range of events, including the International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC 2017, Vienna, Austria), 2nd Highlights on Algorithms (HALG 2017, Berlin, Germany) and ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2017, Barcelona, Spain).

Ancillary Activities

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