Rate My Professor Wim Nuijten

Wim P.M. Nuijten is a Full Professor (part-time) in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where he is affiliated with the Process Analytics group. He also serves as the Scientific Director of the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI). Nuijten obtained his Master's degree in Computing Science from TU/e in February 1990, with a thesis titled "Genetische algoritmen en Job Shop scheduling" supervised by K.M. van Hee and A.E. Eiben. He completed his PhD in Computing Science at TU/e in 1994, with a dissertation on "Time and Resource Constrained Scheduling: A Constraint Satisfaction Approach." His early work focused on constraint programming applications to scheduling problems.

Nuijten's research expertise encompasses optimization, constraint-based scheduling, job shop scheduling, neural combinatorial optimization, graph neural networks, explainable artificial intelligence, and AI ethics, contributing to UN SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure). He co-authored the seminal book "Constraint-based Scheduling: Applying Constraint Programming to Scheduling Problems" with Philippe Baptiste and Claude Le Pape in 2001. Notable recent publications include "Graph neural networks for job shop scheduling problems: A survey" (2025, Computers & Operations Research, 28 citations), "Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Stochastic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problems" (2025, AAAI Conference), "Explainable Optimization: Leveraging Large Language Models for User-Friendly Explanations" (2025, xAI Conference), and "Revisiting Expected Possession Value in Football" (2025, IcSPORTS). He leads the Learning and Explaining Optimization (LEO) project (2022-2028). Nuijten has garnered over 1,080 Scopus citations across 42 research outputs, including 18 conference papers and 12 journal articles. In 2016, he co-received the European Journal of Operational Research Best Review Paper award for work on multimodal transportation for perishable products. He serves on the External Advisory Board of the NSF AI4Opt Institute at Georgia Tech and the International Advisory Board of the AI Center at RWTH Aachen University, and is a co-founder of MakesPerfect as well as an investor and adviser at Airvision. His contributions extend to press commentary on AI ethics and innovation.