anna latour

anna latour

research fellow. computer scientist. feminist.

Defence time for Jeroen

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I am very proud of my student Jeroen Rook, who defended his Master thesis today! The title of his presentation was: Caching in Model Counters: A Journey through Space and Time. With a very general audience, Jeroen had his work cut out for him to explain not only his work, but also the basics of propositional model counting.

/images/2021/misc/Screenshot_20210629_114907-anon.png

After his presentation, Jeroen defended his work to me and his other advisers, Prof. Dr. Holger Hoos and Prof. Dr. Siegfried Nijssen. He handled our questions as well as those from the audience quite well, impressing us with his knowledge of the #P complexity class.

A preliminary version of this work was accepted at the Workshop on Counting and Sampling 2021.

You May Also Enjoy

Moon milk

12 minute read

Published:

The first conferences I ever attended as a doctorate student were IJCAI 2017 and CP 2017, which both took place in Melbourne. At the time, I had a position as a visiting researcher at ICTEAM at Université catholique de Louvain. After the conference, three fellow doctorate students from UC Louvain and I travelled to Tasmania, for a two-and-a-half-day trip. It resulted in one of my favourite travel stories of all time.

Introducing gismo: a tool for finding grouped independent supports

30 minute read

Published:

My first paper since joining Prof. Dr. Kuldeep Meel’s group at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has been accepted to IJCAI 2023! The topic of this paper was a completely new direction for me, and I learned a lot during this project. I had the great privilege to work with Kuldeep and with Prof. Dr. Arunabha Sen for Arizona State University (ASU) on this project, and learned a lot from each of them. In this blog post, I will share a bit about the problem that we solve, why it needs solving, and how we solve it, introducing our new tool: gismo.

Books that helped me through my doctorate

6 minute read

Published:

Two months ago, I defended my dissertation. I am very grateful to my advisors, my doctorate committee, my opposition committee, and my paranimphs. I thought long and hard about which thank-you presents would be appropriate and of value to them. In the end, I just decided to present them with some wisdom.

It takes a village

8 minute read

Published:

As a Master student, I once asked Siegfried if I should use ‘‘I’’ or ‘‘we’’ in my thesis. After all, the words were written by me, but we did the research together. He explained that, even if you are the sole author of a text, you should always write ‘‘we’’, because no piece of research ever is the product of just one person. I believed him then, but the experience of being a PhD candidate drove the lesson home, never to be forgotten. In this blog post, however, I am truly ‘‘I’’, and use it to thank those that make us ‘‘we’’.