We are proud to announce that the 2020-2021 OR/MS Scientific Writing Activity was a complete success, even in the face of a global pandemic. This year, we received ten final extended abstracts: four in logistics, two in stochastic optimization, two in machine learning, one in electricity, and one in scheduling.

The third edition of the scientific writing activity just ended. The goal of this activity is to experiment the publication process of a scientific paper by mimicking the submission of a paper and peer reviewing. This year again, several students took part in the activity to develop their writing skills. The final submissions have been evaluated by a jury of professors that have highlighted the high quality of the works submitted. We wish to congratulate the winners of this year’s activity:

• 1st place, tie: Gabriel Homsi for his paper "Dynamic and Stochastic Rematching for Ridesharing Systems: Formulations and Reductions"
• 1st place, tie: Jørgen Skålnes for his paper "A new formulation for the inventory routing problem"
• 2nd place: Peyman Kafaei for his paper "Deep Q-learning for simultaneous Beam Orientation and trajectory optimization for Cyberknife"
• 3rd place: Nazgol Niroumandrad for her paper "A Reinforcement Tabu Search Algorithm"
• Honorable mention: Tayeb Mhamedi for his paper "A Branch-Price-and-cut algorithm for the two echelon vehicle routing problem with time windows"

A summary of the winners’ work is available hereafter.

Congratulations are in order for all the participants of this year and for the quality of their work! We welcome all students to join us next year for the fourth edition of the writing activity!

The organizers,
Marilène, Matthieu and Rosemarie 

Best Presentation Award
Charles Cossette, "The Basics of Multi-Robot Formation Control"

2nd Best Presentation Award (ex aequo)
Narges Sereshti, "Epidemic Models and Coronavirus"
Rosemarie Santa González, "Humanitarian Relief with Mobile Clinics"

Congratulations!