Thuc Vu is in his third year of studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He will receive his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in May 2004.

Thuc has done significant research in artificial intelligence, contributing to two major projects. In one project, he developed a novel set of techniques that enable a designer of a multi-agent system to specify team behaviors for autonomous agents. This work included a new approach that introduced structural constraints, thus ensuring designs that would be more efficient at run-time. With his teammates, he then created an experimental test-bed for evaluating team-behavior specifications in complex and dynamic virtual worlds. In another project, Thuc single-handedly developed a simulator and optimizer for difficult logistics optimization problems. He continued to work on the core optimizer, combining a constraint-based method followed by multi-phase simulated annealing in the convex-hull of constraints to minimize costs and maximize a satisfaction function.

Thuc is also currently working on a method of automatically generating C code from specifications of agent behavior. He was the first author and presenter of a paper at AAMAS-2003, co-author of a paper at the Third ACG Workshop in 2003, and is the principal author of a paper that he and his research advisor plan to submit to AAMAS-2004. A senior faculty member describes Thuc as "simply off the scale, far off the scale."

Thuc maintains a 4.0 average in his course work, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. He was selected for the Dean's List from 2001 to 2003, and was recently initiated into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He has been a tutor for many students in several classes, including a challenging Discrete Math class for CS majors; he is also the founder and co-president of the Vietnamese Student Association at CMU. He has been a summer intern at VT Tech Company, eMed Technologies, and Bosch Research Technology Center. Thuc won the 2001 USACO International Spring Contest in Programming and the 2001 USACO American National Olympiad in Programming, and was named to the 2001 All-American Programming Team.

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