No constraints
By: Violette Frescobaldi /
Tag: Thought-leaders
Youssef Hamadi: applied mathematics researcher and top-flight scientist, directing research projects in Cambridge and Orsay. It's an extraordinary story of a son of Berber immigrants, driven by the thirst for freedom.
Youssef Hamadi: avoiding impositions.
Speaking in a soft voice without a trace of false modesty, Youssef Hamadi begins by saying that he's done “nothing out of the ordinary”. He talks about being a son of Berber immigrants from a humble background and becoming a researcher in applied mathematics in Cambridge, then adds with the same humility that he doesn't feel he has “done very much”. Such is the paradoxical story of a constraint programming specialist, whose whole life has been driven by avoidance of all forms of imposed choice.
From Bastia to Cambridge – out into the wide world
Hamadi grew up in Corsica, and speaks of how the sight of car ferries leaving the port fuelled his desire to travel. He evokes the pressure he was under on this island to which his parents, who were illiterate, had chosen to emigrate. One of seven children, he was constantly reminded by his eldest sister – acting as a surrogate mother – of the family saying that “one only ever works for oneself“. All the while, he felt the incessant yearning to leave.
Hamadi discovered his vocation at the age of 12, after a two-week hospital stay following an accident. Quenching his boredom by reading the French science magazine Science et Vie, he discovered computer programming. His first “get-away” was the University of Montpellier, where he studied applied mathematics and computer science, funded by the “fantastic” (to use Youssef's words) French scholarship system. He also benefited from an environment full of international students who gave him an inkling of “other ways of looking at things”.
Hamadi gained his doctorate in 2000 and has since published extensively in high impact peer-review scientific journals.
Feeling hemmed in by the limitations of the France's academic system, the ivory tower mentality and parochialism, he decided to move on, and this time it was to the Thales central laboratory in Paris, where he worked on optimising protection systems for the French navy.
All the principles of research in combinatorial optimisation were there: finite resources (time, power-units, numbers of anti-missile missiles, etc.), an objective (for example, protecting a ship or a region), and an optimal solution to be reached by combining all the relevant criteria. Yet even in this setting Hamadi's scope for career progression was limited.
Hamadi alludes to his background being a hindrance to professional success in competition with the French elite graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique: “I felt I had found my way to freedom in quite a number of respects. I was determined not to have anything imposed upon me. And I wanted to go abroad.” His first port of call was the UK, initially Bristol, and then Cambridge in 2003, where Hamadi joined the Microsoft Research laboratory, an “international and very open” environment where he was given the opportunity to establish a Constraint Programming team.
His work in Cambridge involves developing solutions to maximise the use of available resources in countless areas that are themselves limited by their own criteria. Hamadi says it was “luck, networking and opportunities” that ultimately gave him the possibility and the means to follow his dream: to pursue fundamental research longterm –“a researcher's heaven” – without losing sight of “the need to tackle real problems”.
Fundamental research, fundamental challenges
Constraint Programming can be applied to a large number of important problems, for instance in the area of sustainable development, water management can be optimised through constraint programs. This is why Hamadi reckons that fundamental research in this area is critical. The work led by Hamadi and his team has a plethora of applications: from the design of programs that detect hidden “bugs” within software code, to the implementation of an industrial assembly line that accounts for the risk of human error, to meeting a company's financial and environment protection targets, configuring aircraft for major airlines or optimising the water management systems in a Chinese city, to mention but a few.
Hamadi has a passion for computer science, but is not a fan of gadgets or of technology for technology's sake; he is more interested in knowing how useful his research is to society. He is currently addressing the social benefits of computer programming through a collaborative research project between INRIA (the French National Research Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics) and Microsoft Research, going back and forth between Cambridge and Orsay. This project aims to leverage “e-science” by producing tools which will help and promote discoveries in experimental research. Indeed, biologists can use this technology to optimise the study of gene interactions, a crucial area of medical research. From fundamental research in Cambridge to applied research in Orsay, Hamadi appears to have struck the right balance between the two extremes of unbridled interest in seeking new frontiers of discovery and the constraints of applied knowledge.
From the moment he left the island of his birth, Hamadi has been guided by a yearning for freedom and flexibility, ultimately seeking the opportunity “to choose what you want and who you want to do it with”, choosing rather than “being forced”. Although freedom is an ideal he never loses sight of, as Hamadi sees it “programmed under constraints”, notably those of loyalty to and memories of his roots. These constraints have strengthened Hamadi's belief in positive discrimination – which he himself didn't benefit from – but they have also further fuelled his dream to see researchers from immigrant communities popularise their work to school students from underprivileged backgrounds, in the hope that “Mohammed at the back of the classroom will say to himself that he, too, can make it”.
Key dates
- 1983 Accident – his vocation revealed to him on reading the science magazine Science et Vie while hospitalised
- 1989 Leaves Corsica for Montpellier University
- 2000 Doctoral thesis in computer science, “The treatment of distributed constraint satisfaction problems”
- 2002 Leaves for England
- 2003 Joins Microsoft Research Cambridge, starts the Constraint Reasoning Group
- 2007 Starts the Adapt research project, at joint INRIA-Microsoft Research centre at Orsay, France
- 2009 Starts the Microsoft-CNRS chair Optimisation and Sustainable Development at École Polytechnique, France