Rate My Professor Ian Miguel

Ian Miguel is Professor and Head of School in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, where he joined in 2004. With over 25 years of experience in Artificial Intelligence, he specialises in solving complex combinatorial optimisation problems through Constraint Programming and related technologies, including Propositional Satisfiability (SAT). His research centres on constraint modelling and solving, decision-making, optimisation, and combinatorial search. Miguel has developed a Constraint Modelling Pipeline that automates the process of compiling high-level problem descriptions into inputs for various automated solvers, enhancing performance in applications such as planning, scheduling, and routing. He is affiliated with the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra.

Miguel has produced 124 research outputs, including 71 conference contributions, 28 journal articles, 12 papers, and 3 books. Key recent publications include 'TabID: automatic identification and tabulation of subproblems in constraint models' (2025, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, with Akgün et al.), 'Athanor: Local search over abstract constraint specifications' (2025, Artificial Intelligence, with Attieh et al.), 'Cross-paradigm modelling: a study of Puzznic' (2025, Proceedings of IEEE ICTAI 2024, with Espasa et al.), 'An evaluation of domain-agnostic representations to enable multi-task learning in combinatorial optimisation' (2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, with Stone et al.), and 'Towards generating discriminating instances for multi-agent pathfinding: a case study with shelf-based warehouse scenarios' (2026, conference paper, with Wu et al.). He has led projects funded by EPSRC, including 'Keep Learning' (2021–2024, Principal Investigator), 'Releasing Conjure: The Automated Constraint Modelling Tool' (2017, Principal Investigator), and 'The Role of the University in the Ethical Digital Nation' (2024–2025, Researcher). Additionally, he has released datasets associated with his work, such as those for Athanor and TabID. In teaching, he delivers CS4402: Constraint Programming and CS4303: Video Games, and supervises PhD students including Carla Davesa Sureda, Adamu Habu, Erdem Kus, Louis Mellac, Tianchen Wu, and Yigit Yazicilar on topics in AI and optimisation.