Ignacio Laplagne
comp.leeds   
     


   Welcome!

Hi! I guess you want to know all about me, right? Anyway, back in October 2003 I started a PhD at the School of Computing, University of Leeds. Several things came up (extra work, two babies, full-time work), so it took longer than expected, but I am now a PhD -- finally!
PhD studies   During my PhD I worked on driver scheduling, that is, the problem of assigning drivers to vehicles (e.g. trains or buses) while optimising certain performance and/or reliability functions. My work was initially part of the EPSRC project "Robust rail driver schedules planning and delay recovery", which was also my source of funding until October 2006. The project -and my thesis- are directed by Dr Raymond Kwan; Dr Ann Kwan was also involved in the project, as was the Scottish train operator ScotRail. So far I've presented our findings at CASPT 04, PATAT 2004, MISTA 05, MIC 2005 and CASPT 06 (which I also helped organise).
academic   Before moving to the UK, I studied Computer Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). My MSc thesis dealt with the implementation of a football team of (real) robots. Our team did quite well in FIRA 2002, held in South Korea alongside the real World Cup! The group is still working at the UBA . While in Argentina, I also worked as a teaching assistant for modules on combinatorial optimisation and numerical analysis , and competed and later helped in the organisation of ACM's International Collegiate Programming Contest.
teaching   I have undertaken tutoring and marking work at the School of Computing, twice with Bio-inspired computing, and once with Maths for Computing 2. In 2004 and 2005 I also worked as a mentor for the so-called Lego League, in which I helped a team of kids from a school in Leeds build an autonomous robot capable of achieving a pre-defined set of tasks, using Lego Mindstorms.
professional   My linkedIn profile.

Starting in October 2006 I took a full-time position in Codefarm, a company based in Brighton that develops optimisation software for the financial sector. I have tried to learn all I can on finance (stucturing of CDOs, if you are interested!). Nowadays I do a mix of software development and architecting, and general internal support on CDO pricing issues.

Before that, I worked part-time for about a year with TRACSiS, a University of Leeds spin-off company that provides crew scheduling tools for the public transport sector; this was very strongly related to my research work for the PhD.

Back in Argentina, I worked for the Ministry of Economy, the Buenos Aires branch of the UK transport consultancy firm Steer Davies Gleave and the government of the City of Buenos Aires. I didn't miss the dot-com bubble, by the way, and held the CTO position for a now-extinct e-health start-up, SaludUno.

personal   Our second son has arrived! Federico was born in late March, and he's growing to be a little monster (weighting at 10 weeks what Nico weighted at 19...). Meanwhile, our son Nico is now close to 3 years old, and is still the prettiest, funniest and most intelligent of them all! Lots of pictures are available at our personal webpage, and lately in our webspace in Picasa web albums.

I have always been involved with athletics, be it track or long-distance running; I run a couple of triathlons in 2003/04. Babies and PhD managed (quite easily) to get all of my time lately though so I'm not that fit currently :)
email   If your are not one of those nasty web robots, you can email me at

Otherwise, please follow this link.

Last updated: 26/Jun/2008