My name is Peter Harvey. I grew up in a place called Muswellbrook, about 150-200km inland from Newcastle, which in turn is about 100km north of Sydney. Other than my current place of residence (Wollongong), I've never lived anywhere else for longer than 2 weeks.
I took to computers at a very early age (I have a photo of myself in nappies pressing a key on an Atari 400 with a membrane keyboard). I first began programming in Atari Basic, then AMOS Basic on an Amiga 500, then AMOS Basic on an Amiga 1200. At some time between the Amiga 500 and 1200 I began writing wireframe 3D computer graphics using AMOS Basic (it took me a few days to discover that projection onto a 2D surface is simply division by Z). For Christmas I received the AMOS Basic 3D extension which at least allowed the graphics to be faster (you have to admit, floating point in Basic on an Amiga is pretty slow).
Also, I began programming on PCs around this time, using Microsoft QBasic then Microsoft QuickBasic. I dabbled in Visual Basic before turning to C and C++. I never dropped the infatuation with 3D graphics, and so wrote a 3D landscape/flight program in C as a DOS executable. I eventually discovered OpenGL and have worked with that ever since.
After completing my HSC I came to the University of Wollongong to study a Bachelor of Mathematics and Bachelor of Computer Science. I am currently in my fourth (final) year of those studies. My specialisation is in pure mathematics, though this is not strictly correct because the course itself leaves very little room for 'specialisation' in anything.
I was introduced to the Decision Systems Laboratory by Chee-Fon Chang as part of the DSL's ongoing RoboCup Simulator League efforts. On that project I was a programmer, and travelled to Sweden as part of the support team for our entry in 1999.
Voluntary work on RoboCup paid-off when I was asked by Aditya Ghose to write the UI for a scheduling project the laboratory was working on in conjuction with BHP-IT. I worked my way up the ranks and was eventually given the responsibility of implementing the scheduling engine itself.
The success of that first scheduling project has led to another project, again with BHP, involving master planning.
During the interval between my first scheduling project and the current planning project I began work on an algorithm to give global consistency to a type of constraint I encountered during that first project. That work has been left mostly unfinished.
I have also dabbled in soft constraints, specificially enhancements to Semiring CSPs when the semiring is partially-ordered (a situation most research seems to ignore). This is continuing work, with a possible reformulation without semirings being the next step.
