Alexander Ek, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher
The Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence Section
Department of Computer Science
KU Leuven, Belgium
Summary
My name is Alexander Ek and I am passionate about data- and logic-driven decision-making (under uncertainty) and trustworthy software. My current position mainly focuses on proof-logging and certifying model expansions in combinatorial optimisation. I am currently funded via the CertiFOX project and supervised by Bart Bogaerts.
My other projects includes combining data science and optimisation for election integrity (including statistical post-election audits), modeling and solving online optimisation problems, and multi-stakeholder optimisation with fairness considerations.
Research interests include:
- Interdisciplinary research with real-world impact
- Constraint-based optimisation modelling.
- Combinatorial/discrete optimisation, and automated planning and scheduling.
- Proof-logging, formal verification, and certifying algorithms.
- Operations research/analytics, applied mathematics, and decision science.
- Online/dynamic/real-time optimisation and robust/stochastic optimization.
- Statistics, data science, and machine learning.
- Constraint programming, and other solving technology.
- Logistics, supply chain management, energy systems, vehicle routing, rostering, and scheduling.
- Economics, fair division, fair resource allocation, and social choice theory.
- Game theory, and bargaining theory
- Election auditing, and election security
- Mixed-integer-continous-discrete optimisation, including non-convex optimisation.
Latest News
I started a Postdoctoral Research Fellow position in the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium, hosted by Bart Bogaerts in the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence section. I will work mainly on proof-logging and certified first-order model expansion.
Link: https://www.bartbogaerts.eu/projects/CertiFOX/
Our papers titled "Doing More With Less: Mismatch-Based Risk-Limiting Audits" and "3+ Seat Risk-Limiting Audits for Single Transferable Vote Elections" were accepted for publication and to be presented at 10th Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting (Voting'25) of the 29th Int'l Conf. on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. It will take place 14 – 18 April 2025 in Miyakojima, Japan
Link: https://www.ifca.ai/fc25/voting/
I presented a talk for our paper titled Improving the Computational Efficiency of Adaptive Audits of IRV Elections at the 9th Int'l Joint Conf. on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID'24), which took place 2 - 4 October 2024 in beautiful Tarragona, Spain.
Link: https://e-vote-id.org/