@thserra.bsky.social
Assistant professor at University of Iowa, formerly at Bucknell University, mathematical optimizer with an #orms PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, curious about scaling up constraint learning, proud father of two
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.
02.12.2025 21:55 — 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0It's been an absolute pleasure working with Ellen, Madeleine, and their amazing PhD students for the past year on making optimization more accessible with generative AI!
I am on the job market this year - check out my website (conlaw.github.io) for more details on what I've been up to.
Please keep an eye out for Connor Lawless (@lawlessopt.bsky.social) on the faculty job market! Connor is a Stanford Human-Centered AI Postdoc, co-hosted by myself and Madeleine Udell. His research combines ML, computational optimization, and HCI, with the goal of building human-centered AI systems.
16.11.2025 18:52 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 1
The 2025 ICS Student Paper Award winner is Hao Hao (CMU) for the paper "Robust Paths: Geometry and Computation," co-authored with Peter Zhang.
01.11.2025 22:37 — 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 4 📌 0
The 2025 ICS Harvey J Greenberg Research Award was presented to Braden L. Crimmins, J. Alex Halderman, and Bradley Sturt for their paper "Improving the Security of United States Elections with Robust Optimization."
01.11.2025 22:32 — 👍 8 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 1
The 2025 ICS Prize Committee recommended the recognition of two submissions as co-winners of the ICS Prize:
(1) Alper Atamtürk, Andrés Gómez, and Shaoning Han
(2) Jason Altschuler and Pablo Parrilo
ok
29.10.2025 05:32 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
And that’s a wrap for #informs2025
See you next year in San Francisco!
Given the capability of foundation models for memorization, which may defeat the purpose of benchmarks even if solvers are designed in earnest not to exploit prior knowledge of the benchmarks, this is an important question when compiling new benchmarks.
28.10.2025 13:14 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
In Hans Mittelmann’s presentation on optimization benchmark results at #informs2025, he raised the point that benchmarking enters a new era with AI being used under the hood by solvers in one way or another.
28.10.2025 13:14 — 👍 8 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I was happy to see him remembered and awarded a posthumous honorable mention to the ICS Prize last night at #informs2025
(To be clear, given my role at ICS, I did not influence the award committee’s decision about this.)
Thinking of my PhD days, my recollection of Shabbir Ahmed was as one of those senior professors who would come, chat, and give advice to other people’s PhD students in workshops and conferences. He was a nice guy who left this world too early.
28.10.2025 13:03 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Group photo taken at the Resilient Networks session at #informs2025. My @isenbergumass.bsky.social PhD student @ismaelpour.bsky.social presented our paper published recently in ITOR on crop and cargo war risk insurance. This is joint work with Borys Kormych.
27.10.2025 22:02 — 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0I’m recruiting a postdoctoral researcher on a fully funded 2-year contract. The topic is developing and implementing new parallel graph algorithms, with applications to data-driven transportation and logistics.
Details and application procedure below ⬇️ Reach out if you have any questions!
Please reach out to one of our faculty members attending #informs2025 if you would like to talk about it!
Link here: tippie.uiowa.edu/faculty-rese...
3/3
This ranking is based on a more comprehensive list of journals considered as top publications for their specific subjects, which reflects the breadth of the scholarship of business analytics faculty, and therefore includes top conferences such as AAAI, ICML, and NeurIPS.
2/3
The University of Iowa is launching a new ranking of business analytics departments (including equivalent departments in other business schools) at this year’s @informs.bsky.social Annual Meeting.
1/3
Wrapping up, I caught up with former colleagues and students from Bucknell University who are here for the conference.
#informs2025
Later, I sat again with Kayse Lee Maass for the panel Research Pathways at the MIF Undergraduate Workshop, hosted by Trilce Encarnacion and Ruben Proano Morales (thank you Austin Saragih for the pic!)
2/3
Had a fun pre-INFORMS Saturday.
First, I joined Kayse Lee Maass and Graeme Warren for the panel Learning and Teaching with Games at the Teaching Excellence and Networking workshop, hosted by Yaren Bilge Kaya.
1/3
Happening right now at INFORMS: Lucas Waddell is talking about our project, which improved how final exams are scheduled at Bucknell University at B406!
You can read more about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.11031
#informs2025
If the LLM that you use for preparing your job application is the same LLM used by the recruiter on the other side for identifying top candidates, does that improve your chances?
Jiannan Xu showed us at #informs2025 Data Mining workshop that YES, it does!
Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
The 2026 Land-Doig Competition is open! This year’s topic is GPU-Accelerated Primal Heuristics for Mixed-Integer Programming. Details below.
www.mixedinteger.org/2026/competi...
👏👏👏 🥲
20.10.2025 14:04 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I’m reasonably confident that this is the first Disney song cover about machine learning conferences.
At least the first one so far.
Don’t tempt me.
#MLSky
youtu.be/kWkgl9Mb2p4?...
Iowa City folks:
Tomorrow(Friday, October 17) I will be talking at the University of Iowa Computer Science's Colloquium @uiowacs.bsky.social about optimization over trained neural networks.
The talk is at 3:30 PM in room 110 MLH.
For more details: cs.uiowa.edu/event/34670/0
@sophie.huiberts.me is featured in a Quanta magazine article about the simplex method.
www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-...
A little tease:
🔍 Resume Matching – Are standardized resumes advantaged by AI tools?
📂 Resume Classification – How do we stop past biases from repeating?
🤖 Large Language Models – Can summaries distort or reward prompt tricks?
📜 Humanities Perspective – Do hiring tools embed cultural values & power?
