Mark Boddy

Prior to joining Galois, Dr. Mark Boddy was co-owner and Chief Scientist at Adventium Labs, which he joined in late 2002 as employee #3. He is an internationally recognized expert in several areas of computer science research, including planning and scheduling, automated reasoning, and constraint-based reasoning. His work has drawn from and in some cases contributed to research in constraint satisfaction, heuristic search, mathematical optimization, classical planning and extensions thereto, temporal reasoning, multi-agent cooperative negotiation, resource-bounded reasoning, and a number of other areas.

Mark’s current and recently-led projects include: applying constraint-based methods to increase the mission effectiveness of cloud-based computing; using previous execution information to improve route planning; model integration and meta-modeling for the design of complex cyber-physical systems; tools for UAV flight certification using structured probabilistic evidence; and providing high-level performance guarantees for robust, reconfigurable autonomous systems for manned space operations, as well as serving as technical consultant for a wide range of other projects at Adventium and other companies.

Mark has a long history of research contributions and service, including an extensive publication record, tutorial presentations, invited talks, and reviewing for both conferences and journal publications. He has served as an external program reviewer for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, was co-chair for the 2007 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, and is a past member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Mark has led projects for NASA, NSF, DARPA, and the Air Force. He co-authored the papers that coined the widely used terms “anytime algorithm,” “performance profile,” and “conformant planning.”

In his previous role as Research Fellow at Honeywell Labs, Mark led teams of up to a dozen engineers in solving technical problems and applying the results to Honeywell products, including the first-ever implementation of an effective scheduling system for an entire petroleum refinery. He was also involved in delivering an avionics processor and communications scheduling tool for the Boeing 777, which required solving a scheduling problem of a scale and complexity far beyond the current state of the art at that time. Developed and delivered in 1994, this system has been extended to application to other airframes, and is still in use today. While at Honeywell, he won the H.W. Sweatt Award (Honeywell’s highest engineering honor) in 2000.

He has a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Brown University, and a B.S. in Physics from Haverford College.