Informs Annual Meeting 2011

I plan to update this post in the course of the following days and I would have also loved to send out a few more tweets, especially now that I have this fancy twitter ribbon, but I have hard time connecting to the internet at the convention center.

Day 1: So the first day of the Informs Annual Meeting is almost over… What were my personal highlights from today? I listened to quite a lot of talks and most of them were really good so that I feel that it would not be fair to mention only a few selected ones. One personal highlight that I would like to mention though is the Student Paper Prize that Dan Dadush from Georgia Tech got for his work together with Santanu Dey and Juan Pablo Vielma on the Chvátal-Gomory closure for compact convex sets. This result is really amazing as it provides deep insights into the way of how cutting-plane procedures work when applied to non-linear relaxations. Congratulations Dan! Below is a picture of the three taken at the session.

Day 2: The second day of the Informs meeting was great. In particular I loved the integer optimization session (for apparent reasons) and had some extremely intense and deep discussions with some of my colleagues – for me this is the most important reason to go to a conference: dialog. One such discussion was with David Goldberg from GATech about the fundamental concepts in optimization/math/reasoning that completely redefine your thinking once fully understood/appreciated (this includes concepts such as “equality”, “proof by contradiction”, “induction”, or “diagonalization”). I will have a separate blog post together with David on that. If you think there is a concept that completely changed your thinking, please email us or drop us a line in the comment section. I am off to my talk now – more later…

Day 3: I actually did not see too much of the third day as I had to leave early.

All in all, Informs 2011 was a great event, in particular to meet all the people that are usually spread all over the US. I was actually quite happy to see that there were also quite a lot of Europeans at the conference