TL;DR: Announcement for CO@WORK and EWG-POR. Fully online and participation is free.

Written by Timo Berthold.

This year, a lot of scientific conferences and workshops had to be cancelled or postponed – many others took the unprecedented situation as a chance to experiment with new, exciting formats. It is great to see how virtual conferences make the latest research insights available too much more people than traditional on-site events do.

Researchers from ZIB and its partners from the Research Campus Modal will join this latest trend towards online workshops and host two exciting meetings in September, one two-week summer school mainly targeting PhD students and one two-day meeting, addressing practitioners from all industries using Operations Research.

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Combinatorial Optimization At Work

CO@Work is an institution. This two-week summer school takes only place every five years and has always brought together researchers, practitioners, and students from all over the world. It addresses PhD students and post-docs interested in the use mathematical optimizations in concrete practical applications. This year’s theme is “Algorithmic Intelligence in Practice”. This amazing event features more than 30 distinguished lecturers from all over the world, including developers and managers of FICO, Google, SAP, Siemens, SAS, Gurobi, Mosek, GAMS, NTT Data, Litic, as well as leading scientists from TU Berlin, FU Berlin, Polytechnique Montréal, RWTH Aachen, the Chinese Academy of Science, University of Southern California, University of Edinburgh, Sabancı Üniversitesi, Escuela Politécnica Nacional Quito, TU Darmstadt, University of Exeter, and many more.

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CO@Work 2015 participants in front of ZIB.

All lectures will be made available on YouTube, and there will be two Q&A sessions for each presentation – typically 11 hours apart, to cover all time zones worldwide. Similarly, there will be two practical exercise sessions each day, with hands-on experience on implementing optimization projects through the python interfaces of FICO Xpress and SCIP. Q&A and exercises will be hosted on Zoom. CO@Work will take place every weekday from September 14 to September 25. Checkout the meeting homepage and registration here. Hurry up, registration closes on September 6!

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Practice of Operations Research – EURO Working Group meeting

The EWG-POR virtual conference is co-hosted by ZIB and FICO. It focusses on an issue that many of us have faced: “Challenges in the deployment of OR projects”. The conference features five keynote lecturers from various industries highlighting how difficulties with the implementation of optimization projects could be overcome. Adrian Zymolka from Axioma will speak about “Optimization in Finance”, Colin Silvester from Uniper will present on “Delivering OR Solutions for Everyday Operations in Energy Trading”, Steffen Klosterhalfen from BASF will talk about “Successful Value Chain Optimization at a Chemical Company”, Ralf Werner from OGE will report on “Operations Research supporting Germany’s energy transition”, and Baris Cem Sal from DHL will let us know how they were “Putting Operations Research into Operations in Deutsche Post DHL Group transition”.

Furthermore, there will be special 45-minute interactive discussion group sessions. All participants are invited to contribute to one of the four rounds on “Change management issues in practical projects”, “Promotion of OR”, “How to state requirements and project specifications at the beginning” and “Relationship/collaboration between academia and industry”. We are curious to see what comes out of these roundtables.

The event will be completed by a wonderful social entertainment session – join to find out more…

The EWG-POR main event will take place on the 28th and 29th of September. The following five Mondays (Oct 5 – Nov 2), there will be a one hour Webinar series, each with two contributed talks on the topic of “Challenges in the deployment of OR projects”.

Checkout the meeting homepage and register now here.