Experience

Intellectica Technology Corporation, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

2010 – present

Founder

• Created an internet-based optimization technology company.

Actenum, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

2006 – 2010

Senior Research Scientist, Optimization Architect, Team-lead of Platform Group

• Technical lead of optimization platform team
• Emphasis on building decision support systems using stochastic local search methods
• Developed applications for the optimization of operations in the energy sector
• Developed predictive analysis and real-time support tools for ambulance services

Tigrsoft (now Matrikon), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

1997 – 2001

Research Scientist, Senior Research Scientist, Head of Scheduling Technology Group

• Applied AI optimization methods to industrial scheduling problems
• Applications included
  • Steel mill scheduling
  • Textile dying process
  • Automotive line sequencing
  • Paper printing

Education

Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C)

University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

2001 – 2006, dissertation submitted Sept. 2009

PhD Computer Science

• Supervised by Eugene C. Freuder and J. Christopher Beck (University of Toronto)
• My thesis addresses the problem of ease-of-use of optimization technology with an empirical study on scheduling problems. The primary result is that strong performance can be achieved using control methods that adapt based on observed performance. These methods are broadly applicable as they do not require extensive feature engineering or domain expertise to achieve good results.

University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

1993 – 1997

BSc Computer Science (1st Class Honours)

• Named as College Scholar for outstanding performance in my first, second and fourth years
• Active in the research of new algorithms with the UCC Constraint Processing Group

Regent’s College, London, UK

1992 – 1993

Liberal Arts Degree (Philosophy and Logic) (1 year of 4 years)

• Dean’s list of outstanding students

Selected Publications

• Carchrae, T. & Beck, J.C., Principles for the Design of Large Neighborhood Search, Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Algorithms,8(3), 245-270, 2009.
• Beck, J.C., Carchrae, T., Freuder, E.C. & Ringwelski, G.,  A Space-Efficient Backtrack-free Representation for Constraint Satisfaction Problems, International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, vol. 17, num 4, pp 703-730, 2008.
• Carchrae, T. & Beck, J.C., Applying Machine Learning to Low Knowledge Control of Optimization Algorithms, Computational Intelligence,21(4), 372-387, 2005.
• Carchrae, T. & Beck, J.C., Cost-based Large Neighborhood Search,Workshop on the Combination of Metaheuristic and Local Search with Constraint Programming Techniques, 2005.
• Beck, J.C., Carchrae T., Freuder, E..C. & Ringwelski, G.,  Backtrack-Free Search for Real-Time Constraint Satisfaction, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, 2004.
• Carchrae, T. & Beck, J.C., Low Knowledge Algorithm Control, Proceedings of the Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2004.
• Freuder, E.C., Carchrae, T., & Beck, J.C., Satisfaction Guaranteed, Workshop on Configuration, Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2003.
• Bergen, M.E., van Beek, P. & Carchrae T. Constraint-based vehicle assembly line sequencing, Proceedings of the 14th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ottawa, Ontario, 88-99, 2001.

Skills

I have experience with following languages and tools

• Java, C++, C
• Google App Engine, AWS EC2
• Javascript, GWT, PHP, CSS, HTML, Perl
• IBM ILOG optimization libraries
• Drools, Prolog, Haskell
• R, Matlab
• SQL, JDBC, ADO
• VB, C#, COM/Interop, Excel
• Eclipse IDE, Visual Studio

Back in the day, assembler (x86 & 68k) and others.

Personal Background

Date of Birth    February 9, 1974

Nationality       British/American Dual National and Permanent Resident in Canada

Interests           I really enjoy writing fast code and building systems to solve real problems, even outside work. When away from the machine I enjoy hiking, biking, dancing, cooking vegetarian feasts, learning with my kids and gardening.