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! 🤓

Xiao Fang and Candi Yano delivered a very comprehensive overview about research in business schools at the #FutureBAProf workshop. This thread is about Dr. Fang’s perspective on the topic, going from a general perspective on information systems to a deep dive on computational design science. 1/N

Qi Luo presented the applicant perspective about the academic job market at the #FutureBAProf workshop with a personal perspective on having switched from a position in industrial engineering to another one in business analytics. 1/2

Annabelle Feng and Kang Zhao talked at the #FutureBAProf workshop about the academic campus interview by focusing on what ChatGPT missed about it. 1/2

Candi Yano and Xiao Fang delivered a very comprehensive overview about research in business schools at the #FutureBAProf workshop. This thread is about Dr. Yano’s perspective on the topic. 1/N

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. 1/2

We are kicking off the first day of the Future Business Analytics Professor workshop at The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business with welcoming remarks by Kang Zhao and an introduction to business analytics by Sam Burer. 1/N

Did you know that solar energy production can be significantly impacted by wildfires? Wildfires generate atmospheric aerosols, which are solid particles that block the incoming solar radiation and are deposited on solar panel surface. (IJDS paper spotlight.) 1/N

Since the news about the untimely passing of Hani S. Mahmassani is spreading, I wrote a tribute to him on my blog: annanagurney.blogspot.com/2025/07/rest... Deepest condolences to his family, friends, students & colleagues around the globe. Hani left an incredible legacy in transportation & #orms.

Laurent Poirrier dives into the engineering side of the simplex method (with slides that speak for themselves). He starts from the standard form of LPs and outlines the usual solving techniques: simplex, interior point, and first-order methods.

Leona Gottwald talks about which components are truly necessary for delivering good performance in modern MIP solvers, drawing from her development experience of HiGHS (and others). #EuroMIP25 #orms

Frédéric Didier presents the MIP-related aspects of Google’s CP-SAT solver, with a focus on how linear relaxations, cuts, and presolve are integrated into a framework originally designed for pure integer problems. #EuroMIP25 #orms

Marouane is live tweeting all #EuroMIP25 talks, follow him to stay up to date

INDIANA JONES AND THE QUEST FOR TRAVEL FUNDS

INDIANA JONES AND THE ONE PERSON IN THE DEPARTMENT WHO KNOWS HOW TO UNJAM THE COPIER