Evidence-Based Optimization

For the first time in the history of mankind, we are accumulating data sets of unprecedented scale and accuracy about physical infrastructures, natural phenomena, man-made processes, and human behavior. These developments, together with progress in high-performance computing, machine learning, and operations research, offer exciting opportunities for the evidence-based optimization of global systems. This talk reviews some case-studies in disaster management, energy systems, high-performance computing, and market optimization to showcase these unique opportunities and their associated challenges, and presents some emerging architectures for evidence-based optimization.
Pascal Van Hentenryck is a Seth Bonder Collegiate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Michigan, he led the Optimisation Research Group (about 70 people) at National ICT Australia (NICTA) and was Professor of Computer Science for about 20 years. Van Hentenryck is the recipient of two honorary degrees and is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He was awarded the 2002 INFORMS ICS Award for research excellence in operations research and compute science, the 2006 ACP Award for research excellence in constraint programming, the 2010-2011 Philip J. Bray Award for Teaching Excellence at Brown University. Van Hentenryck is the author of five MIT Press books and has developed a number of innovative optimisation systems that are widely used in academia and industry. Van Hentenryck's research is currently at the intersection of data science and optimization with a focus on disaster management, energy systems, recommender systems, and transportation.