Jim Luedtke

After 18+ years working for Maplesoft, I was "downsized" on Black Friday and I am currently on the lookout for new opportunities. I will be looking in earnest in the new year, but any leads on math programming/teaching work (especially in Los Angeles) would be appreciated.

As newsrooms shutter and paywalls rise elsewhere, public media delivers critical, unbiased reporting without fear or favor. That's the promise of a free press in a democracy.

Click here to support the network of voices that keeps our public conversation honest and informed: n.pr/4pCcFIx

I’m excited to share the materials from my Stanford seminar course, “AI for Algorithmic Reasoning and Optimization”: vitercik.github.io/ai4algs_25/. It covered formal algorithmic frameworks for analyzing LLM reasoning, GNNs for combinatorial/mathematical optimization, and theoretical guarantees.

⚠️ WANTED: PhD student ⚠️
The topic? GPU-friendly algorithms for discrete optimization and mathematical programming, to be used inside decision-focused learning pipelines.
The mentors? My colleague Axel Parmentier and myself.
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Michini will use CAREER Award to improve post-disaster aid operations and more - College of Engineering - University of Wisconsin-Madison While Carla Michini and her family took their usual summer trip to her native Italy in 2025, this was no relaxing getaway. Michini, an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of...

Along with advancing optimization and game-theory research for post-disaster aid, Prof. Michini’s NSF CAREER Award supports new courses and researcher visits to help students learn the field: “I want to break that barrier…between professors and students..."🔗go.wisc.edu/zeuiau
@uwmadison.bsky.social

Lately, I have been obsessed with developing theoretically based optimization algorithms that actually attain the best practical performance.
Alas, the classic model of minimax optimal methods is overly conservative; it overfits to tune its worst-case.
We found a path forward 1/

Alberto Del Pia
Projection-width: a unifying structural parameter for separable discrete optimization
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02990

Anna Deza, Georgina Hall
Sum of Squares Submodularity
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24550

Congratulations!

Beyond Smoothed Analysis: Analyzing the Simplex Method by the Book Narrowing the gap between theory and practice is a longstanding goal of the algorithm analysis community. To further progress our understanding of how algorithms work in practice, we propose a new alg...

The simplex algorithm is super efficient. 80 years of experience says it runs in linear time. Nobody can explain _why_ it is so fast.

We invented a new algorithm analysis framework to find out.

Any serious future for democracy in America requires us to get rid of single-member districts. It is the only long-term solution to this nonsense.

🎉 Our very own Professor Laura Albert has been named a 2025 INFORMS Fellow!

This prestigious honor recognizes her outstanding contributions to operations research, analytics, and data science. 💡📊

We’re so proud of you, Laura — keep changing the world!
@INFORMS

Researchers Discover the Optimal Way To Optimize | Quanta Magazine The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.

@sophie.huiberts.me is featured in a Quanta magazine article about the simplex method.

www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-...

Screenshot of Figure 7 from "Route Planning in Transportation Networks" by Bast et al. (2016). It is a graph comparing various route-planning algorithms on the road network of Western Europe. The X axis is the preprocessing time of the graph, and the Y axis is the time taken by an individual path query after that. Both axes span several orders of magnitude along the Pareto frontier between fast queries and fast preprocessing.

Periodic appreciation post for this gem of a review by Hannah Bast and coauthors. If you think you know how to compute shortest paths... trust me, you don't. I can give you one spoiler though: preprocessing the graph helps A LOT.
doi.org/10.1007/978-...

@jannisku.bsky.social is giving a very interesting talk on explainable (integer) optimization at the @euroorml.bsky.social seminar, highlighting counterfactual explanations before diving on new work with Coherent Local Explanations for Mathematical Optimization (CLEMO): arxiv.org/abs/2502.04840

Assistant/Associate/Full Professor in Industrial & Systems Engineering (RISE AI) - Madison, Wisconsin, United States Current Employees: If you are currently employed at any of the Universities of Wisconsin, log in to Workday to apply through the internal application process.Job Category:FacultyEmployment Type:Regula...

We are hiring two faculty positions in ISyE at UW-Madison
Please come and join us!

jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

Congratulations!!!

What an opportunity! Where can an applicant learn more about it and submit their application?

"Republicans run the entire government but can't keep it open"

That's it. That's the whole story.

Winter 2025 / 2026 schools on artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, optimization, and other relevant topics in operations research Following up on a recent post about Summer 2025 schools, here is a new list. The purpose of organizing this is to help graduate students find a summer school to gain skills related to operations re…

Here is a list of Winter / Summer schools on AI, data science, optimization, and related topics in operations research happening between October of 2025 and February of 2026:

thiagoserra.com/2025/09/22/w...

settings > content & media > autoplay video & gifs = off

📢 New in JMLR (w @rajivsambharya.bsky.social)! 🎉 Data-driven guarantees for classical & learned optimizers via sample bounds + PAC-Bayes theory.

📄 jmlr.org/papers/v26/2...
💻 github.com/stellatogrp/...

GitHub - thserra/discreet: What is the Best Way to Do Something? A Discreet Tour of Discrete Optimization What is the Best Way to Do Something? A Discreet Tour of Discrete Optimization - thserra/discreet

I wrote a tutorial inspired by my experience conducting research with undergraduate students who knew how to code, but were yet to learn about optimization.

What is the Best Way to Do Something? A Discreet Tour of Discrete Optimization: github.com/thserra/disc...

The Banal Evil of AI Safety Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?

I wrote about the tragic death of Adam Raine and the venal negligence of "AI Safety." www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...

Nobody covers Wisconsin politics better than @danshafer.bsky.social & you should take advantage of this great deal

Israel had every right to respond to Hamas' 7 Oct 2023 attacks.

But this has NOT been a proportionate response: it has been an escalating campaign of war crimes, crimes against humanity & genocide as the world just watches.

It is fair to hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas terrorists. 5/5

The #FutureBAProf workshop continues with Tallys Yunes, the 22-time winner of University of Miami Herbert Business School Excellence in Teaching award, sharing about teaching in business schools.

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Eco-driving measures could significantly reduce vehicle emissions Implementing co-driving techniques, like the use of intelligent speed controls to mitigate congestion at traffic lights, can significantly reduce intersection carbon dioxide emissions without…

A new study led by Prof. Cathy Wu and colleagues reveals that eco-driving measures, such as dynamically adjusting vehicle speeds to reduce stopping and excessive acceleration, can cut carbon emissions between 11 and 22 percent. news.mit.edu/2025/eco-dri...

Fascinating video about the history of linear programming

Screenshot of paper abstract, with text: "A core ethos of the Economics and Computation (EconCS) community is that people have complex private preferences and information of which the central planner is unaware, but which an appropriately designed mechanism can uncover to improve collective decisionmaking. This ethos underlies the community’s largest deployed success stories, from stable matching systems to participatory budgeting. I ask: is this choice and information aggregation “worth it”? In particular, I discuss how such systems induce heterogeneous participation: those already relatively advantaged are, empirically, more able to pay time costs and navigate administrative burdens imposed by the mechanisms. I draw on three case studies, including my own work – complex democratic mechanisms, resident crowdsourcing, and school matching. I end with lessons for practice and research, challenging the community to help reduce participation heterogeneity and design and deploy mechanisms that meet a “best of both worlds” north star: use preferences and information from those who choose to participate, but provide a “sufficient” quality of service to those who do not."

New piece, out in the Sigecom Exchanges! It's my first solo-author piece, and the closest thing I've written to being my "manifesto." #econsky #ecsky
arxiv.org/abs/2507.03600