AI Constraint Programming in .NET
The Hong Kong .NET User Group organized a Campus Tour Series recently and the first stop in City University of Hong Kong (CityU) was completed successfully 2 days ago.
The sessions are presented in a Lecture Threater in that university (Well, the booking procedures and people involved are complicate?! So if you're a UG leader and want to cooperate with educational unit, I'd suggest you plan and prepare it earlier) and we're glad to invite 2 guest speakers:
- J2EE and .NET - Similarities and Differences - Mr. Michael Leung (.NET Developer Evangelist of Microsoft HK Limited)
- AI Constraint Programming with .NET - Dr. Andy Chun (Associate Professor of CityU)
The first session is presented by Michael, who actually firstly presented the same session in the Windows 2003 Server Launch Day a few months ago. So this is my second time to see this show, and nothing new to me.
While I was impressed by the second session, Dr. Andy is a famous person in the academic field and won a lot of awards/honors in the past, including the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI.org) award. He's specialize in "Artificial Intelligent" (AI) and Constraint Programming (CP), which is something new for the audience, including me!
Dr. Andy explain the concept behind CP, case studies, and technical details of his self-developed .NET CP Engine - NSolver (The library of this object, tutorial, example is free download). He explained Constraint Propagation, Searching, Domain Reduction, BackTracking (He show pseducode inheriting from an ArrayList and store different values of an object with TimeStamp, such that the engine can rollback an object to a particular value and go on searching via another path in the Constraint Network. Interesting :)
I'd also like to know how many guru here working in AI with .NET in your day time job, anyway I think you'll have interest in take a look at his personal web site.
In addition, all of the presentation and more information can be found on our UG Portal, and we'll upload the video of these sessions onto the portal later as well. After the presentation, Andy and I talk about adding Log4Net, Enterprise Instrumentation Framework and NUnit into the next version of his NSolver engine, the overall discussion and event are very nice!