Bart Jansen

Bart Jansen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His areas of expertise include algorithms, complexity theory, and graph theory. Bart’s research interests mainly concern parameterized (graph) algorithmics, with a special focus on provably effective preprocessing (kernelization). He is a member of NETWORKS, an NWO Gravitation project spanning multiple universities in the Netherlands. Its goal is to investigate the interplay between algorithms and stochastics to tackle complex problems on networks.

Bart’s main focus is on understanding the power of data reduction. In practice, the search for the exact solution to an NP-complete problem is often accelerated by orders of magnitude by adding a preprocessing phase. Before attempting to solve the problem, it is simplified by repeatedly applying reduction rules that do not change the answer. How can such reduction rules be developed systematically, how can we explain their success, and how can we predict estimate what types of reduction rules are useful for a certain application? These are questions that Bart attacks on a daily basis.

Investigating efficient preprocessing algorithms is like exploring the lost continent of polynomial time. For decades, researchers believed there are no polynomial-time algorithms which are guaranteed to be useful in the search for exact answers to NP-complete problems. But we’re now discovering there is a rich variety of preprocessing algorithms to be found!”