The Summer 2026 list of schools has been updated with four new opportunities. You can look for those directly by searching for "Included on January 15"! thiagoserra.com/2026/01/04/s...

Excited to present a new preprint with @nkgarg.bsky.social: presenting usage statistics and observational findings from Paper Skygest in the first six months of deployment! 🎉📜 arxiv.org/abs/2601.04253

Kicking off 2026, here is a new list of summer schools on artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, and operations research: thiagoserra.com/2026/01/04/s...

I am happy to share a new version of the Surrogate Within A Surrogate paper. This paper shows that we can find better solutions for an optimization problem involving a dense neural network by pruning it. We made an extra effort to clarify our contributions and to expand our experimental evaluation.

Make a Bond movie academic: Facets are Forever

Facets are Forever? 💎 📝

Make a Bond movie academic: (Sean Connery is unfunded) You Only Travel Twice

Make a Bond movie academic: License to Queue #orms

Make a Bond movie academic: "The World is Not Enough: A PhD dissertation on the avarice of billionaires and the socio economic divide causing a fracture in democratic processes”

Looking for an auspicious PhD? Try it the Iowa way! We have a top-notch department with active research at the intersection of many important fundamental and emerging subjects. There is still time—the application deadline is three weeks away! More information here: tippie.uiowa.edu/phd/phd-busi...

Happy to have contributed to Anna Mitchell’s cover story at The Daily Iowan about data centers in Iowa. You can read it here: dailyiowan.com/2025/12/09/c...

Today I am celebrating the symbolic thousandth citation on Google Scholar.

Next week, I will be participating on a panel hosted by @gurobioptimization.bsky.social about training the next generation of mathematical optimizers. You can join the conversation here: www.brighttalk.com/webcast/1918...

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.

It'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.

The 2025 ICS Student Paper Award winner is Hao Hao (CMU) for the paper "Robust Paths: Geometry and Computation," co-authored with Peter Zhang.

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."

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

And that’s a wrap for #informs2025 See you next year in San Francisco!

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.

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.

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.

I’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!

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

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...

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-...

AI is reshaping hiring—but how exactly? In this IJHRM editorial with Melissa Intindola, Neil Boyd, and John Hunter, we explore why understanding AI’s impact on hiring requires both technical insight and HR expertise. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@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

It was great having Joe Paat visiting The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business on Friday — and having a chance to further understand this work!

What do @ryanjoneil.bsky.social and @thserra.bsky.social think is worth knowing about translating operations research and decision science learnings into industry practice? Join this session to find out: www.nextmv.io/videos/what-... #orms #informs #operationsresearch #decisionscience #datascience

Last week I had the immense privilege of giving the opening keynote talk of the BRACIS - Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems #bracis2025 and visiting the beautiful city of Fortaleza for the first time. 1/3

Closing #bracis2025 with mastery, Sandra Avila talked about her journey working on diagnosing melanomas (a type of skin cancer). Interestingly, the story starts with winning a classification contest, and then evolves from her working backwards to figure out what the models actually predicted. 1/N

Evangelos Papalexakis gave an interesting and accessible keynote about latent structure and tensor decomposition at #bracis2025 The identification of latent structure was motivated with the observation from Miller’s Law that we only keep “7 +/- 2” items in memory at any given time time. 1/N

Today I learned that there is a dataset about puns in Portuguese called Puntuguese 😂 … and also that much better results on this dataset will be in the proceedings of #bracis2025 The talk was presented by Jhúlia de Souza Leal’s master’s advisor on behalf of the authors

Neat talk by Arnaldo Mendes Pires Junior on optimizing cascading hydropower systems at BRACIS - Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems #bracis2025

Livy Real ended a talk on automated evaluation in legal applications with an interesting reflection on how the push for using LLMs for evaluating documents may slowly but surely influence how legal documents are produced, to the point of making us forget how they are currently produced. #bracis2025

Very interesting talk by Ingrid De Araújo Felix about using neural networks for solving stochastic differential equations using some different types of activation functions at the BRACIS - Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems #bracis2025

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...

I am happy to share that the preprint for a project that changed how final exams are scheduled at Bucknell University is now available on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.11031

Thiago Serra What is the Best Way to Do Something? A Discreet Tour of Discrete Optimization https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05932

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...

Slightly diminish a book

Here is a short video of mine for The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business What Do You Do? series on my work at the intersection of mathematical optimization and machine learning. m.youtube.com/shorts/c6dfM...

Be the welcoming face for new attendees at the next INFORMS Annual Meeting. Speaking from experience, it is a fun thing to do! 🤓