PhD student
Université de Montréal
Charly Robinson La Rocca is a 30-year-old Ph.D. student in Computer Science supervised by Emma Frejinger at Université de Montréal. He is half French Canadian, half Italian and grew up in Montreal, where he spent most of his childhood learning about music and developed a deep interest for the classical guitar. In the beginning of his career, he acquired a degree in engineering physics and then pursued a master’s in operations research under the supervision of Jean-François Cordeau. Charly researched the electric taxi dispatching problem with a local start-up for which he worked as an employee to develop and implement the algorithms in production. He discovered the power of AI in 2018 and decided to do his Ph.D. in 2019. Charly’s thesis is on the integration of learning algorithm to accelerate the discovery of solutions for combinatorial optimization problems such as the locomotive assignment problem.