Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck
Tired of solving Sudokus by hand? This class teaches you how to solve complex search problems with discrete optimization concepts and algorithms, including constraint programming, local search, and mixed–integer programming. Optimization technology is ubiquitous in our society. It schedules planes and their crews, coordinates the production of steel, and organizes the transportation of iron ore from the mines to the ports. Optimization clears the day–ahead and real–time markets to deliver electricity to millions of people. It organizes kidney exchanges and cancer treatments and helps scientists understand the fundamental fabric of life, control complex chemical reactions, and design drugs that may benefit billions of individuals. This class is an introduction to discrete optimization and exposes students to some of the most fundamental concepts and algorithms in the field. It covers constraint programming, local search, and mixed–integer programming from their foundations to their applications for complex practical problems in areas such as scheduling, vehicle routing, supply–chain optimization, and resource allocation. The University of Melbourne is an internationally recognised research intensive University with a strong tradition of excellence in teaching, research, and community engagement. Established in 1853, it is Australia’s second oldest University.
Instructor Details
Courses : 1
Specification: Discrete Optimization
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56 reviews for Discrete Optimization
Add a review
| Price | Free |
|---|---|
| Provider | |
| Duration | 33 hours |
| Year | 2016 |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Language | English |
| Certificate | Yes |
| Quizzes | Yes |
Amin F –
This is a fun and challenging course! Without doubt the most challenging courses I’ve ever done in coursera! I have a few suggestions for anyone who is considering to start this course: 1 You have to be a skillful programmer, be comfortable with algorithm design, tree and graphs structures and recursion. Also a general knowledge of models are useful. 2 You have to have enough patience to watch loooooooong videos (but the professor teaches in a pretty awesome and in times, hilarious ways!) 3 You really need to spend +15 hours per week on this course, not only the videos for each week is long but also each programming assignment will take tremendous amount of your time! 4 And finally you should be tough and not give up and sometimes have the courage to write your code again from scratch after failure!
Marcin K –
superb !!!!!!!
Kamen P –
greatest course ever
Meytal L –
Great course! Very challenging
Li H –
The programming assignments of this course are very challenge and the pursuit of the ‘Good Optimization’ is torturous, especially after Knapsack Problem, such as the TSP, Facility Problem and VRP. However, the sense of achievement gained when you passed the online judge is also unspeakable. Last but not least, Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck is really a nice man, he is humorous and charming. Wish you a memorable and nice experiences on the on the journey of OPTIMIZATION.
Osvaldo A –
Excellent course, challenging and practical … I recommend it for any serious programmer.
Sasikumar C –
Excellent course. The programming assignments make you think about optimization
Juexu Y –
Wonderful material and humorous instructor. BTW, I like his hat : )
Xushegndong –
I love this course!
Justyna J Z –
Great instructor, course is taught with passion pouring from the screen. It inspires me a lot!
Oystein S –
Good course. The instructor is really a fast talker and it may be hard to grasp everything at the first time you watch the videos. About the assignments: The assignments are really hard. Yes! Really really hard. I’ve never taken any MOOC course where the assignments are so hard. Al in all, I can say that this course really thought me something about discrete optimization, and I would love to learn even more about this interesting field.
Philippe C –
Great course, very challenging as problems are NP hard and hence force you to find the right approaches for various problem set sizes. After a while, you get hooked and tried to find better and better solutions, reviewing videos for overlooked information, looking at research papers and available resources on the net. Programming times are only a minimum and I spent much more time than indicated.
PaweB W –
Most difficult on line course I’ve ever had. Demanding and engaging at the same time. Good luck to people without IT background :D.
Pawel W –
Most difficult on line course I’ve ever had. Demanding and engaging at the same time. Good luck to people without IT background :D.
khalid d –
i wish there was 6 start rating so i can give this prof his due, he made a very complicated subject look very simple and easy to understand thanks a million
Anders A –
This is my fifth or sixt online course on coursera, and it is without a doubt the best one I have done. Apart from the little goofy start with Indiana Jones, I simple loved the course. There was a lot of useful material covering what would have been several courses at my university. The assignments were challenging, sometimes frustrating, but really fun as well. I had a lot of fun doing this course.
Le B C –
useful for optimize researcher
Melissa J –
Very difficult. Harder than pretty much all of the courses I’ve taken in college, more or less, based on how much material is covered and the amount of research you have to do on top of the lectures in order to just get a passing grade on the assignments. Definitely a grad level course, probably harder than most grad level courses I’ve taken in college just for the amount of effort needed to get a perfect score on all assignments (unfortunately it depends on how good of a computer you have to run your solutions). The challenge just makes it even more fun. Lectures barely covers anything needed to do the assignments, which just gives you a surface level introduction to the concepts needed to solve the problems. The discussion forum is crucial to getting good guidance on how to solve the problems. Pretty much all of the assignments involved doing your own research and reading a bunch of problem related research papers to figure out what you want to use for your own implementations. I had a blast learning, and thank you so much for offering this course on coursera.
olivier h –
I love it so much. Rather challenging , but excellent as it is clear and pushes you to improve in the fields you need (maths, modelization , programming, algorithms)
Greg K –
The most challenging course that I’ve ever enrolled in. The instruction videos are just a 30% of what it takes to get perfect score on the assignments. Its the only course that I feel it was totally worth the time trying to complete it at 100%. Amazing instructor, and I’m totally gonna keep and revisit all of the course videos.
Ka H ( C –
Good Course, I had learn a lot of concept of optimization
Yifan D –
Difficult!
ido h –
pascal the professor can explain anything in a way that anyone can understand
Chitrang S –
Excellent Course, I would highly recommend for all algorithmist and programmers. It step by steps teaches how to approach NP hard problems. The way the professor teaches make this highly difficult subject easy. Of course assignments are very challenging.
Aditya U S –
Truly challenging course. Had enrolled out of curiosity. Before starting had only basic knowledge on combinatorial optimization. The course content is good and the course theme is basically exploratory. Really a dense course if determined to study in depth.The instructor is brilliant and his teaching style keeps you motivated all the time. The assignments are good and requires you to think thoroughly about the problem. Getting a higher grade is obviously challenging if you are a newbie to this topic, although scoring a decent grade is definitely possible. Overall loved the experience.
Galley D –
I just completed the course. This an amazing course with an Outstanding professor and highly interesting, although difficult, assignments. Thanks for this! I am proud to have finished
Slav K –
Exceptional coverage of optimization fundamentals. Learning of practical applied methods. Real university level course, no water down “data science”. Absolutely love it! Thank you professor Pascal.
Aditya D –
Excellent course! The course video are very clear and build on each other as the course progress. It is well structured. The assignments have the right amount of difficulty.
Masood J K –
Great lectures and helpful homework. The assignments were really hard but it was worth it. I learned a lot from them. The only thing I can put a comment on is that the Brach and Bound method was not taught clearly.
Akash S –
I am sure this is the best course out there to help students/Professionals to understand the complexity of the optimization problems specially designed and explained by Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck in his own hilarious style . The assignments are really challenging and make you up to try different strategies. Most of the times the classical approaches like Mixed Integer programming and Constraint Programming fail to provide solution in a reasonable time.But that’s when you become of intuitive developing your own ideas/ heuristics.This course covers a lot of optimization concepts like dynamic programming, Constraint Programming ,Mixed Integer programming and Local search. Waiting for the next one!.. Till then keep optimizing ….
Mr. J –
Brilliant examination of the basic central aspect of discrete Optimization I found the projects to be enjoyable and challenging I elected to not use libraries to make my solutions. Working the projects improved my Python.
Shihan, Z –
I appreciate the enthusiasm from the professor’s teaching. Also the quality of the homework is very high, which help me deeply understand the concept about optimization methods. I highly recommend this course to all the people who desire the basic knowledge about NP hard problem, and optimization thought.
Rajdeep D –
Awesome Teacher.I’m just amazed .Than you sir for our great effort.
Kha T –
Awesome but challenging course. Feeling sweet after hard working days.
Gauthier B –
Really interesting course!! Thank you to professors
Paulo V S R D –
This course is HARD… but very rewarding. You should have some nice familiarity with programming before taking it.
MANJUNATHA –
Very good course for operation research aspirants. Assignments are very good to understand the problems and the complexity of the problems.Thanks to the team
hope –
The best course on Coursera. Unlike the do it by rote Deep Learning classes, there is much creativity and freedom in tackling all assignments. The assignments are stimulating, challenging, and approximate real life problem solving very well.
Manuel A –
A very comprehensive and challening course on optimization. Algorithms are explained at a high level and is up to the student to implement them (on any language, but Python is sugested). Canonical problems in optimization are tackled, such as TSP, VRP and facility location. As a Data Scientist with no Computer Science background, implementing those algorithms to pass assignmets have been very challenging. Industrial solvers like ortools, gurobi, etc. can be used, but they are not covered.
Andre L d A R –
Extremely interesting, hard, entertaining and applicable course.
Edmund L –
Difficult course, but rewarding once you have completed the assignments. This course presents a variety of discrete optimization problems to be solved. Great course overall, although I wish the course is structured such that we don’t need to read research papers to complete the assignments.
Rodrigo M T –
Otimo curso, descontraido e projetado para facilitar. Material relevante que serve como introducao a mais estudos.
Andrew K –
Best course I have done so far on Coursera. The assignments are the best part of the course and are very challenging but ensure that you learn and understand the material. You will want to have some programming experience as you will need to code optimization algorithms from scratch.
Yury K –
Pascal is highly engaging lecturer. The course is superb, but is indeed advanced. Not very suitable as an intro to a topic (the way I tried to use it). Scraped through though, and rather proud of it : )
Juri M –
The professor give really really good lectures and the material very well prepared.
Lester K –
Excellent courses with really challenging assignments.
Samuel d S B –
Best course I’ve taken on Coursera so far. Really challenges you to learn and apply algorithms/solvers.
CHENG J –
greet course that helps me a lot in understanding or
Leo –
I was surprised how clear are the Lectures. It’s such fun taking this course. We use the techniques (Dynamic Progrmaming, Local Search, etc) to solve those NP complete problems. Highly recommond it to anyone who wants to refresh their optimization skills.
Serhat G –
Extraordinary…
Stefano M –
The quality of the lectures, as well as of the teaching material (slides, exercises, etc.), is just excellent. Thanks a lot to the instructors for putting so much effort in preparing it! Although having worked with optimization for a few years, I could learn a lot from this course. For someone aiming at learning optimization, there are not many well structured courses/resources available; and this is surely one of the best resources I have found in years. The course is difficult much more difficult than other data science courses on Coursera and thus requires many hours, good programming skills, and some dedication. But for me it was surely worth it! My only remark/negative feedback is the lack of guidance especially at the very beginning on what external resources students are supposed to use for the assignments. I understand that this is in part intentional in order to make the course more challenging; however, compared to other courses I took, I feel that here the guidance is sometimes excessively little, and it is quite easy to get stuck on a given exercise. I honestly felt a bit lost at the beginning, and doubted whether it made sense to continue the course. Also, having access or not to licences of professional tools can make a significant difference in the level of difficulty of the assignments (implementing from scratch some solvers is, in some cases, a rather difficult task, which also requires quite advanced programming skills). I really think that providing more guidance/instructions on this would be of very high benefit here. There is actually a video which partly addresses this point, but it is only at the end of Week 3 (I guess many people abandon before having seen it I recommend students to watch it at the very beginning). Also, possibly related to this, my feeling is that currently the course is far less active than in the last years; the forums are not very active, and very seldom instructors/tutors intervene in the discussion.
Volodymyr F –
The course is very entertaining, it was just a pleasure to take it
Bharat K –
I learned very valuable optimization skills by doing. Learning by doing is the best kind of learning. Professor Van Hentenryck’s teaching style is so lively. You will keep wanting to rerun the videos and keep going!
Shunsuke N –
Great course. The assignments are challenging and very interesting. I recommend trying to achieve 10/10 score, it may be very hard but you can learn a lot.
Tommi J –
One of the best courses I’ve ever taken, including all my main studies in three different universities. Don’t expect to breeze through this course with some easy multiple choice questionnaires the professor is not kidding in the beginning when he says the course is hard. It actually took me 3 years of on and off, admittedly sporadic efforts to get through the course with more than a few times when I questioned whether I would ever finish it. What kept me coming back every time though was knowing that this is a course where your efforts pay off highly in learning coding the algorithms yourself is obviously more demanding then getting handed something already working, but at the same time this is simply the best way to learn. Pedagogically everything is set up ideally for the motivated learner the lectures are inspiring (even entertaining!) and focus on the key ideas behind the methods rather than obscure equations. After getting through the lectures of a section and getting the programming assignment in front of you (which are superbly designed with the online grading system working flawlessly), you should have conceptually a solid basis for starting to start writing your optimisation algorithm (actually, in many cases you would have several algorithm classes to choose from and in the end especially towards the last few assignments I had to implement several different algorithms for the different individual problems of the assignment to get a passing score). The learning curve is perfectly set up with each successive assignment being a bit harder than the one before it (and also a bit more rewarding once you finally manage to get through it). Finally, it’s certainly worth it to read through the informative discussion forums to get new ideas when you get stuck in an assignment. The bottom line is that if you are interested in learning about discrete optimisation and are motivated enough to spend the fairly significant amount of time and effort required, then you simply couldn’t ask for a better course than this thanks so much to the course staff for making this amazing course available on Coursera!
Christoph L –
Great course with very nice instructor. Assignments are very challenging at times and one should not take the course if one is not rather confident in one’s programming abilities (preferably python). You will likely have to program a lot and write your own codes from scratch. I did the course with Matlab but figuring out how to upload the results into python was initially a pain. If you enjoy programming, have sufficient time per week to do the course (at least 5 10 hours no re scheduling of overall course deadline!) and want to learn about discrete optimization then this course is clearly for you!