Polytechnique Montréal’s Board of Directors today announced the appointment of Professor Gilles Savard as Acting President for a term beginning October 1, 2021, and ending January 7, 2022. Thereafter, he will become Interim President (as of January 8, 2022), until a new President is appointed.
Since October 1st, 2021, Michael Kokkolaras has been promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.
Congratulations!
On September 14, Professor Emeritus Gilbert Laporte was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), during a digital ceremony between Norway and Canada.
Charles Audet published a book entitled "Optimisation continue" at the Presses internationales Polytechnique. The book is primarily intended for students of the MTH6420-Optimisation Continue course, which replaces the MTH6403-Programmation mathématique I course, but may be useful to a much broader audience. The book consists of three parts. The first contains two chapters dealing with fundamental notions in optimization. The second part contains five chapters dealing with algorithmic methods and linear optimization theory. The last part also contains five chapters and focuses on the presentation and on the analysis of constrained and unconstrained nonlinear optimization methods. The book presents the intuitions at the origin of various optimization techniques and rigorously demonstrates all the stated results, which allows to grasp the internal mechanisms of the methods and their operation. Many examples, figures and exercises facilitate understanding.
Okan Arslan, professor in the Department of Decision Sciences, received a brilliant distinction in the Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge, a competition organized by the online retail giant honouring operations research and data-driven optimization proficiency.
Okan Arslan and his teammate, doctoral student Rasit Abay, of the University of New South Wales in Australia, were awarded 3rd place in the competition, accompanied by US$25,000 in prize money.
Gilbert Laporte, retired HEC Montréal professor, received the title of Professor Emeritus this year. This title is a prestigious distinction saluting the recipient’s outstanding contribution to teaching, research and the development and renown of HEC Montréal.
Congratulations!
Professor Andrea Lodi from Polytechnique Montréal received the INFORMS Farkas Prize. This prize is awarded annually to a mid-career researcher for outstanding contributions to the field of optimization, over the course of their career.
Congratulations!
Title: Models for Integrated Demand Forecasting and Planning: Application to Large-scale Transportation Networks and Impact Assessment
Title: Quantification de l’incertitude avec un ensemble de substituts pour l’optimisation de boîtes noires
A GERAD team, including Pierre Pereira and Emeric Coutarde from Polytechnique Montréal won the 1st place in the PlankThon Challenge which took place from June 25 to 27, 2021.
Congratulations!
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.
Daniel Aloise, Gilles Caporossi and Sebastien Le Digabel published a [special issue](https://link.springer.com/journal/10898/volumes-and-issues/81-1 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of GERAD in Journal of Global Optimization, Volume 81, Number 1, September 2021.
David Ardia, Associate Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences, received the Best Paper Award for 2018-2019 from the International Journal of Forecasting.
The article is entitled Questioning the news about economic growth: Sparse forecasting using thousands of news-based sentiment values. It was co-authored with Kris Boudt, Professor at Ghent University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Keven Bluteau, Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University and HEC Montréal.
Based on a very competitive process, the selection of the winning entry was made from among all the articles published in the journal during 2018 and 2019.
The last issue of the Newsletter is now available. Enjoy!
Title: Apprentissage basé sur le Qini pour la prédiction de l'effet causal conditionnel
Title: Essays on Ecological and Economic Viability of Agricultural Systems
Sincere thanks to OBVIA (International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology) for awarding a $125k grant for the project to study the governance and ethics of algorithms in an environment of mobility on demand and of an innovation ecosystem. The team (Andrea Lodi, Antoine Legrain, François Soumis, and Hugues Delmaire) to which is added researchers Patrick Turmel from Université Laval, Vincent Gautrais from Université de Montréal and Sébastien Gambs from UQAM, must study the impact of social, legal, security factors ... on the performance and structure of algorithms in a real-time environment requiring the management of large amounts of data. An important step in the development of technically and socially viable solutions.
Starting June 1st, 2021, Mrs. Michèle Breton will be the new Director of the Department of Decision Sciences of HEC Montréal. She will take charge of Mr. Gilles Caporossi’ work which is at this position since June 2019.
Congradulations to Masoud Chitsaz, directed by Jean-François Cordeau and Raf Jans from HEC Montréal. He received the 2020 Best Thesis award for his thesis entitled "Integrated Production and Transportation Planning ."
GERAD is pleased to make available its thinking on the future of research and innovation developed within the framework of the call for contributions launched by the MEI: Quebec Strategy for Research and Innovation 2022. For any question you can contact Hugues Delmaire, Director of valuation and transfers at GERAD and author of our contribution.
Ministère de l’Économie et de l’Innovation du Québec
Conseil de l’innovation du Québec
