We are delighted to share that Prof. Jimmy H.M. Lee and his former PhD student, Dr. Allen Z. Zhong, have received the Best Technical Paper Award for their work “Transition Dominance in Domain-Independent Dynamic Programming” at the 31st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2025), held in August, 2025, in Glasgow, Scotland.
Their paper formally defines transition dominance within the domain-independent dynamic programming framework, which is a powerful method for solving challenging optimization problems, such as scheduling, planning, and resource allocation. This innovation enables dynamic programming optimization algorithms to run significantly more efficiently, achieving up to a 5 to 10 times speed-up across multiple problem classes, by allowing solvers to safely skip unnecessary computations.
Dr. Zhong completed his PhD under Prof. Lee’s supervision and is now a Lecturer at the Department of Data Science & Artificial Intelligence, Monash University. This recognition highlights their impactful collaboration with international researchers from Australia, Canada and Japan, and underscores the strong contributions of our researchers and alumni to the global research community.
