Patrick Prosser
Encyclopedia
Patrick Prosser is a Computer Scientist at Glasgow University. His research has centred on Constraint programming
Constraint programming
Constraint programming is a programming paradigm wherein relations between variables are stated in the form of constraints. Constraints differ from the common primitives of imperative programming languages in that they do not specify a step or sequence of steps to execute, but rather the properties...

, although it has extended into the application of those techniques into other areas. For his major contributions to the theory and practice of Constraint Programming, Patrick was awarded the Association for Constraint Programming's Research Excellence Award on 15th September 2011: he is only the sixth recipient of this award. He gave a prerecorded acceptance speech, which is available on Youtube.

His most notable contribution is his invention of Conflict-directed backjumping, an advanced technique for reducing search in constraint problems by avoiding unnecessary work on backtracking. His 1993 paper describing this has been cited more than 500 times according to Google Scholar.

Other areas of constraint programming he has researched include the identification of hard problems
and techniques for solving vehicle routing problems. His interest in applications of constraint programming has included (for example) how it can be used in computing species trees.

Amongst his recreations is kite flying as a founder of the Kite Club of Scotland. He has written about the Tetrahedral kite
Tetrahedral kite
A tetrahedral kite is a multicelled rigid box kite composed of tetrahedrally shaped cells. The cells are usually arranged in such a way that the entire kite is also a regular tetrahedron. The kite can be described as a compound dihedral kite as well....

.

External links

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