Anna Louise Latour started her PhD research in January 2017 at the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics (ICTEAM) of Université catholique de Louvain (UC Louvain) in Belgium, under supervision of dr. Siegfried Nijssen (UC Louvain) and prof. dr. Joost Kok (Universiteit Twente). She came to Leiden in February 2018 and joined the ADA research group in November 2018.
Her research is funded by an NWO TOP grant awarded to dr. Nijssen for his PROFIDDS (PRObabilistic Features for Intelligent Declarative Data Science) project. Within this project, she focuses on developing solving methods for problems in which users have to make optimal decisions under constraints and uncertainties.
An example of such a problem is a Power Grid Reliability Problem. Suppose that we want to help a user who runs a maintenance project on an electric grid to make it more robust against natural disasters (like earthquakes or hurricanes). During a disaster, each powerline in the grid has a certain probability of breakage (uncertainty). If too many of them break, important buildings like hospitals may become disconnected from the grid and lose power. By reinforcing powerlines, the user can make them stronger and less likely to break during an earthquake. However, reinforcing lines is an expensive task, and the user only has a limited budget (a constraint). On which powerlines should the user spend their budget, such that they maximise (optimal decision making) the expected number of important buildings that are still connected to a powerplant?
Her aim is to develop solving methods for these kinds of problems such that they are a) generic, and therefore applicable to a wide range of problems, and b) accessible, even to people who are not programmers.
In order to achieve this goal, she combines modelling and solving techniques from both Constraint Programming and Probabilistic Logic Programming.
Together with Marie Anastacio, Anna Louise also supervises Master student Daniël Fokkinga in his Master’s research.
ADA Research Group 