Ryan Cory-Wright

We are now accepting nominations for the 2025 ICS Student Paper Award

I am joined on the award committee by:

-Ryan Cory-Wright (Imperial)
-Yongchun Li (Tennessee)
-Young Woong Park (Iowa State)

connect.informs.org/computing/aw...

@ryancorywright.bsky.social
@icsinforms.bsky.social

When Russia wrote their national anthem, the words changed but the song remained the same as the Soviet one.

Today, grants are being cancelled for using the word "inequality" in the abstract (ax<=b). Maybe we can look to history for how to proceed.

E.g., how dynamic programming got its name.

Hidden gems in OR/MS: "L. V. Kantorovich: The Price Implications of Optimal Planning"
www.jstor.org/stable/2727266

Duality theory was almost discovered in the Soviet Union in the 1940s by Kantorovich. His research was halted for ideological reasons.

We concluded the conference with a dinner at Worcester College which made me feel like I was in The Great Hall of Harry Potter!

Looking forward to the conference next year (location to be announced)

Finally, Brendan O'Donoghue (DeepMind, not pictured) gave an overview of some of the recent successes of Google DeepMind in terms of using reinforcement learning and generative AI to solve challenging problems like the Mathematics Olympiad as a step towards artificial general intelligence.

Eight, Paul Goulart (Oxford) talked about the Clarabel.jl solver for conic programs, and discussed how explicitly formulating quadratic programs in a quadratic way (rather than reformulating them as SOCPs) can improve the performance of an interior point method github.com/oxfordcontro...

Seventh, Pierre Pinson (Imperial, not pictured) investigated trading strategies for price-taking participants in energy markets as studied in "Distributionally robust trading strategies for renewable energy producers" pierrepinson.com/wp-content/u...

Sixth, my colleague Gah-Yi Ban (Imperial College Business School) analyzed a retailer that provides an online sharing economy as analyzed in the working paper "Personalized Assortment Optimization for a Subscription Business Model of Experience Goods
" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Fifth, Neil Walton (Durham) discussed modeling the NHS waitlist as a queueing system and analyzed how the UK Labour Party's pledge that most patients should have access to elective procedures within 18 weeks is going (TL:DR there is progress, not enough to meet the pledge within the current term) .

Fourth, Stefan Scholtes (Cambridge) talked about market power in drug supply chains as studied in catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10...., ending with a call for other researchers to also investigate the long-run implications of creating non-for-profit drug manufacturers like Civica Rx

Third, Rouba Ibrahim (UCL) talked about threshold policies for reducing the length of queues in queueing systems as discussed in "The Effects of Information on Abandonment and Congestion in Non-Stationary Priority Queues
" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Second, Nitish Jain (LBS, not pictured) talked about the role that expiry dates play in food waste and policies for mitigating food waste as discussed in "Until Later is Preferred Over Sooner: Multiplicity in Product Expiration Dates and Food Waste in Retail Stores" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

First up we had a fascinating talk from Matthias Holweg (Oxford) on the role of generative AI (chat-GPT etc.) in academic research and right-sizing editorial policies, as discussed in ""

On 4 April, we had the pleasure of organizing the 2nd London Operations Research Day with Agni Orfanoudaki, Yi-Chun Akchen and Jean Pauphilet at Oxford. The conference took place at Worcester College; thx to Qube Research and Technology for sponsorship

A recap thread ⬇️ londonorday.github.io

CALL FOR POSTERS: At the MIP Workshop Europe we will host a poster session. Submissions from all career stages are welcome.

Poster deadline: April 14!
Workshop: July 1-3

I have not 🤯 🤯

Just finished reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Super interesting book! Made me think about the NeurIPS submission checklist.

Since 2021, the number of questions in the submission checklist has ballooned from 5 to 16. Is this another example of "everything bagel liberalism"?

Sanjeeb Dash gave a very interesting keynote talk at the INFORMS Computing Society Conference @informs.bsky.social @icsinforms.bsky.social on the use of polynomial optimization for automatic knowledge discovery through symbolic regression.

🧵1/N

Our latest blogpost is a little weekend treat for everybody interested in conic reformulations!

themosekblog.blogspot.com/2025/02/a-sm...

We also develop new convex relaxations for low-rank problems, via Shor relaxations.

Our original relaxations involve matrices of size n^2 x n^2, which is not tractable. However, we show how to make our relaxations block decomposable, and thus tractable, for several applications.

New paper alert 🚨
optimization-online.org/2025/01/impr... “Improved Approximation Algorithms for Low-Rank Problems Using Semidefinite Optimization” (w/ Jean Pauphilet)

Inspired by Goemans-Williamson’s success in binary quadratic optimization, we generalize to semi-orthogonal and low-rank matrices.

Jisun Lee, Andr\'es G\'omez, Alper Atamt\"urk
Convexification of Multi-period Quadratic Programs with Indicators
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17178

Are you an Ops researcher in the London area (broadly construed)? Are you free on 4 April 2025? Consider signing up for the London OR day in Oxford: mailing list available at londonorday.github.io

Hidden gems in OR and MS: When I was a PhD student at the OR Center at MIT, the students ran a software tools course every winter, introducing tools like Git and Julia/JuMP. I shared this with my PhD student, so 2024 version (it gets updated each year): github.com/angkoulouras...