Attention all PhD students and postdocs approaching the academic job market, and especially those not in business analytics departments: the application deadline for the FutureBAProf is April 30! tippie.uiowa.edu/news-events/...

Tomorrow I will be presenting at the EURO Online Seminar Series on Operational Research and Machine Learning. This live webinar will be at 9:30 Iowa / 10:30 New York / 11:30 São Paulo / 15:30 Lisbon / 16:30 Central European time.

Had a lovely time back in Pittsburgh by invitation of Vrishabh Patil. I meant to take a selfie with Vrishabh, Macarena, and Sebastián, but I forgot! So here is a selfie of my first encounter with Scotty’s statue, which didn’t exist when I was a student at Carnegie Mellon.

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

The recording of my talk at University of Wisconsin-Madison is now online: m.youtube.com/watch?v=zL3n... Thanks again @optimizer.bsky.social, @jefflinderoth.bsky.social, @lauraalbertphd.bsky.social, @madsjw.bsky.social, and all other Badgers!

13 PhD positions in in applied #maths, #orms, engineering, or CS within the ALMOA consortium -> study applications of European and international relevance in areas such as sustainable energy systems, green gogistics, etc. almoa.aau.at?page_id=53

We are now accepting applications for the 5th FutureBAProf workshop at the University of Iowa for advanced PhD students and postdocs. This is the one and only workshop that demystifies academic careers in business analytics and helps participants prepare for the job market and careers in this field.

Heading back home after an amazing INFORMS Optimization Society Conference, seeing Jiaxiao Fang give her first talk, talking about Madeline Colbert’s work, catching up with my former Bucknell students Changkun Guan and Tsugunobu Miyake, […]

Rosemarie Santa González talked at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference about optimizing the cold food supply chain of an indigenous nation in Northern United States. 1/2

Jeff Decary talked at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference about solving portfolio optimization problems with binary options and combinatorial options using logic-based Benders decomposition.

Federico Bobbio talked at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference about an incentive-compatible mechanism without monetary transfers for coordinating how companies and scientists can share spectrum for satellite communications, which corresponds to solving a continuous knapsack problem.

Kimia Ghobadi talked about pragmatical aspects of using inverse optimization at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference. Ghobadi started by discussing the non-uniqueness of inverse solutions due to, for example, using a single vertex as the alternate in linear programming problems. 1/2

Eva Ley talked at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference about solving integer inverse optimization problems, meaning that we want to find integer objective coefficients that would make the alternate solution optimal. 1/4

Very interesting talk by Sam Garvin at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference about solving inverse mixed-integer optimization problems by alternating between (1) generating local Chvátal cuts with the constraints that are active at the alternate solution & (2) generating the Chvátal closure.

Today at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference there will be a memetic tribute to the late Chuck Norris at the Constraint Learning session, which starts at 4:30 in the Cabinet Room. PS: I am not telling in which talk this is happening. You will have to stay for the whole session to see it. 🙈

Rekha Thomas talked about sampling to compute the average value of a function over a graph at the first keynote talk of the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference. She started by exemplifying the same problem in simpler settings, such as line segments and spheres. 1/3

Bimol Nath Roy talks at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference about enforcing constraints when using neural networks in optimization models. 1/2

Next at the INFORMS Optimization Society conference, Dhruva Sundararajan talks about how to apply machine learning to obtain better results with the undercover heuristic in mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems. 1/2

Starting the INFORMS Optimization Society conference, Can Li talks about solving nonlinear optimization problems involving AC power flow constraints by using the linear DC power flow constraints to solve a low-fidelity counterpart of this optimization model. 1/2

Our survey on deep learning and polyhedral theory is finally published! pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/... This was a great opportunity to explain what we have been looking at without the constraints of being focused on a specific technical contribution or page limit.

Today my master’s advisor, Yoshiko Wakabayashi, is being awarded the title of Professor Emeritus at University of São Paulo. She has been a knowledgeable, caring & dedicated member of the Brazilian algorithms, combinatorics & optimization community throughout her career. Congratulations Yoshiko!

Thanks for all the OptiBeer @optimizer.bsky.social @jefflinderoth.bsky.social and for the OptiWine @lauraalbertphd.bsky.social Heading back to Corn Land from Dairy Land after a day packed with very interesting research discussions

Excited to have @thserra.bsky.social here at UW Madison for SILO seminar series.

Thiago Serra posted on his blog what I think are some useful tips on doing presentations. thiagoserra.com/2026/03/03/m...

There are many things about preparing and presenting slides that I keep repeating to students, so I figured that I should put them down in writing. I do think that they help a lot. (And if I am doing it, why not share it more broadly?) thiagoserra.com/2026/03/03/m...

Mark your calendars and start optimizing your resources and schedules: the 2027 International Symposium on Mathematical Programming will be held from July 25 to to 30 in beautiful Amsterdam! Neil Yorke-Smith and I will organize the stream Discrete Optimization with Machine Learning. #ismp2027

Working on (part of) 59 pages and 33 questions of a proof with a 48-hour deadline, but lucky to have Gonzalo Muñoz as corresponding author. Our survey will soon be online at IJoC!

I am happy to share about a new paper with Jiatai Tong, Yilin Zhu, and Sam Burer — which also just got accepted at CPAIOR 2026: Optimization over Trained Neural Networks: Going Large with Gradient-Based Algorithms 1/N

What can’t LLMs do? If you get caught using them for data fitting, you deserve a warning. Mochen Yang talked at Iowa’s Tippie College of Business about the caveats of using LLMs for that purpose. After all, getting gpt-4o to predict 0.1875 entails predicting tokens “0”, “.”, “187”, and “5”! 1/4

As someone who has always been involved with computing, optimization, and AI… I am happy to share that I am joining the editorial board of the INFORMS Journal on Computing as Associate Editor in AI and Optimization! 😎 pubsonline.informs.org/page/ijoc/ed...

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!