Rate My Professor Guido Tack

Guido Tack is an Associate Professor in the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence within the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. He earned his Diplom Informatiker degree in Computer Science from Saarland University, Germany, on 30 June 2003, followed by his doctoral degree, Dr.-Ing., from the same department on 29 January 2009. His dissertation, titled 'Constraint Propagation – Models, Techniques, Implementation,' earned him the 2010 Doctoral Research Award from the Association for Constraint Programming. Before joining Monash University as a Lecturer and Monash Larkins Fellow in February 2012, Tack served as a postdoctoral researcher at NICTA Victoria Laboratory, Saarland University in Germany, and KU Leuven in Belgium. At Monash, he has advanced to Associate Professor, leading key initiatives in constraint programming systems.

Tack's research specializes in combinatorial optimisation, focusing on architecture and implementation techniques for constraint solvers, translation of constraint modelling languages, and industrial applications. He leads the development of the MiniZinc constraint modelling language and toolchain, a standard in the field, and is a primary developer of Gecode, a state-of-the-art open-source constraint programming library. His broader academic interests include programming languages and computational logic. Tack's influence is reflected in highly cited publications, including 'MiniZinc: Towards a standard CP modelling language' (2007, 1357 citations), 'The MiniZinc challenge 2008–2013' (2014, 182 citations), 'Views and iterators for generic constraint implementations' (2005, 97 citations), 'Constraint propagation: models, techniques, implementation' (2009, 73 citations), and 'Search combinators' (2013, 53 citations). Recent contributions include editing the proceedings for the 22nd International Conference on Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research (CPAIOR 2025) and papers such as 'Unit Types for MiniZinc' (2025) and 'Predict+Optimize Problem in Renewable Energy Scheduling' (2025). He has received the FIT Dean's Award for Excellence in Research Impact (2017) and was a finalist for the Australian Research Data Commons Eureka Prize for Excellence in Research Software (2024, with collaborators). Tack serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Constraints journal since 2015 and has held roles in the Association for Constraint Programming executive committee (2014-2016) and memberships in ACM and the Association for Constraint Programming.