Professor
Education
- Ph.D. Operations Research (1981), Stanford University
- M.S. Computer Science (1981), Stanford University
- A.B. Magna Cum Laude Applied Mathematics (1977), Harvard University
Expertise
- Operations research
- Animal groups
- Robots
- Biologically inspired design
- Computational social choice
- Sustainability
About
Craig Tovey is a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He also co-directs CBID, the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design.
Dr. Tovey's principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns inverse optimization for electric grid management, classical and biomimetic algorithms for robots and webhosting, the behavior of animal groups, sustainability measurement, and political polarization.
Dr. Tovey received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the 1989 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for research in heuristics. He was granted a Senior Research Associateship from the National Research Council in 1990, was named an Institute Fellow at Georgia Tech in 1994, and received the Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award in 2011. In 2016, Dr. Tovey was recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce with the Test of Time Award for his work as co-author of the paper “How Hard Is It to Control an Election?” He was a 2016 Golden Goose Award recipient for his role on an interdisciplinary team that studied honey bee foraging behavior which led to the development of the Honey Bee Algorithm to allocate shared webservers to internet traffic.
Dr. Tovey received an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1977 and both an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981.
Research
Dr. Tovey's principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns manipulation in group decision making, evolutionary pressures for dominance hierarchies, graph theory, measuring self-organization, bounds on Qplex accuracy, and political polarization.
Teaching
Dr. Tovey has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in industrial engineering, operations research, discrete mathematics, and computer science. The graduate level courses include: mathematics of operations research, linear optimization, integer and combinatorial optimization, deterministic optimization, stochastic processes, computational optimization methods, group decision making and game theory, optimization heuristics, network algorithms, and various special topics. The undergraduate level courses include deterministic optimization, advanced optimization, probability, stochastic models, capstone and Create-X senior design, how to read and do proofs, theory of computation, measuring sustainability, and duality.
Awards and Honors
- Golden Goose Award 2016
- ACM SIGecon Test of Time Award 2016
- Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award 2011
- Georgia Tech Institute Fellow 1994
- National Research Council Senior Associate 1990-1991
- Jacob Wolfowitz Price 1989
- Presidential Young Investigator 1985
Representative Publications
1. “A Simplified NP-Complete Satisfiability Problem,” Discrete Applied Mathematics, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 85-90, 1984.
2. “Simulated Simulated Annealing,” Journal of Mathematics and Management Sciences, Vol. 8, pp. 389-407, 1988
3. Bartholdi, J. J., C. Tovey, and M. Trick, “The Computational Difficulty of Manipulating an Election,” Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 6, pp. 227-241, 1989.
4. Bartholdi, J. J., C. Tovey, and M. Trick, “Voting Schemes for Which It Can be Difficult to Tell Who Won the Election,” Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 6, pp. 157-165, 1989.
5. Llewellyn, D. C., C. Tovey, and M. Trick, “Local Optimization on Graphs,” Discrete Applied Mathematics, Vol. 3, pp. 157-178, 1989.
6. Stone, R. and C. Tovey, “The Simplex and Projective Scaling Algorithms as Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares Methods,” SIAM Review, Vol. 33, pp. 220-237, 1991.
7. Borie, R. B., R.G. Parker, and C.A. Tovey, “Automatic Generation of Linear Algorithms on Recursive Graphs From a Predicate Calculus,” Algorithmica, Vol. 7, pp. 555-581, 1992.
8. Carter, M. and C. Tovey, “When Is the Classroom Assignment Problem Hard?” Operations Research, Vol. 40, pp. 528-539, 1992.
9. Bartholdi, J., C.A. Tovey, and M. Trick, “How Hard Is It To Control an Election?” Mathematical and Computer Modelling, 1992.
10. Seeley, T. and C. Tovey, “Why Search Time is a Reliable Indicator of Nectar Influx in Honey Bee Colonies,” Animal Behavior, Vol. 47, pp. 311-316, 1993.
11. Bartholdi, J., T. Seeley, C. Tovey, and J. Vande Vate, “The Pattern and Effectiveness of Forager Allocation Among Food Sources in Honey Bee Colonies,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 160, pp. 23-40, 1993.
12. Ammons, J. C., M. Carlyle, L. Crammer, G. W. DePuy, K. P. Ellis, L. G. McGinnis, C. A. Tovey, and H. Xu, “Component Allocation to Balance Workload in Printed Circuit Card Assembly Systems,” IIE Transactions, Vol. 29, pp. 265-275, 1997.
13. Chandra, B., H. Karloff, and C. Tovey, “New Results on the old K-opt Algorithm for the TSP,” SIAM Journal on Computing, Vol. 28, pp. 1998-2029, 1999.
14. Koenig, S., C. Tovey and W. Halliburton, “Greedy Mapping of Terrain,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 3594-3599, 2001.[107]
15. Tovey, C.A., “Tutorial on Computational Complexity,” Interfaces, v.32, No. 3, pp. 30-61, 2002.
16. Chase, I., C. Tovey, D. Spangler, and M. Manfredonia, “Individual Differences versus Social Dynamics in the Formation of Animal Dominance Hierarchies,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences., Volume 99, No. 8, pp. 5744-5749, 2002.
17. Koenig, S., Y. Smirnov, and C. Tovey, “Performance Bounds for Planning in Unknown Terrain,” Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 147, pp. 253-279, 2003.
18. N.J.Mlot, C.A.Tovey, D.Hu. “Fire Ants Self-Assemble into Waterproof Rafts to Survive Floods.” Proceedings of the National Academy of. Sciences, online April 2011 doi:10.1073.
19. S. Nakrani and C.Tovey, On Honey Bees and Dynamic Server Allocation in Internet Hosting Centers, Adaptive Behavior, Vol. 12, No. 3-4, pages 223-240, December 2004.
20. C. Tovey, M. Lagoudakis, S. Jain and S. Koenig; The Generation of Bidding Rules for Auction-Based Robot Coordination; Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence; Proceedings of the Third International Multi-Robot Systems Workshop; A. Schultz, L. Parker and F. Schneider (Eds.); Springer; pages 3-14, 2005.
21. M. Lagoudakis, V. Markakis, D. Kempe, P. Keskinocak, S. Koenig, A. Kleywegt, C. Tovey, A. Meyerson and S. Jain, Auction-Based Multi-Robot Routing, Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics: Science and Systems (RoSS), 2005, pages 343-350, Cambridge, USA.
22. Hang Ma, S. Koenig, N. Ayanian, L. Cohen, W. Hönig, T. Kumar, T. Uras, H. Xu, C. Tovey, G. Sharon, “Overview: Generalizations of multi-agent path finding to real-world scenarios,” IJCAI-16 Workshop on Multi-Agent Path Finding, ArXiv 1702.05515 February 2017.
23. Tovey, Craig A., Linear Optimization and Duality, CRC Press. First edition: 2021.
24. Braden Hunsaker and Craig Tovey, ``Easy and Hard Separation of Sparse and Dense Odd-Set Constraints in Matching”, Discrete Optimization Vol. 54 (2024).
25. James Bailey and Craig Tovey, “Impact of Tie-Breaking on the Manipulability of Elections”, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2024). May 2024, pp. 105-113.
26. James Bailey and Craig Tovey, “On the Gale-Shaley Algorithm for Stable Matchings with a Partial Honesty Nash Refinement, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2025)