The last issue of the Newsletter is now available. Enjoy!

• Spotlights on ... - Two decades of blackbox optimization applications
  
• Actions and interactions - Bridging engineering and family medicine practice: Application of AI and OR
  
• Impact papers - Planning the future North American northeast electricity sector
  
• Postdoctoral fellows - Amay Cheam, Pedro Luis Miranda Lugo, Claudie Ratté-Fortin, Yassine Yaakoubi
  
• Where are they now? - Charles Gauvin, Aleksandr Kazachov, Patrick St-Louis
  
• Who are they? - Janosch Ortmann
  

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 ."

For more information.

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

During the Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. Solène Kojtych, doctoral student in mechanical engineering won the 3rd jury prize as well as an amount of $150 for her presentation entitled "Optimisation de boîtes noires discontinues : application à la conception d'aubes de turbomachines robustes aux interactions de contact". Solène's research work is directed by Alain Batailly and Charles Audet.

In the summer of 2024, a committee chaired by Charles Audet will organize in Montréal the 25th edition of the world’s largest international mathematical optimization conference: the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP 2024).

Read more.

A GERAD team, including Dounia Lakhmiri, Christophe Tribes, Sébastien Le Digabel as well as Mahdi Zolnouri and Eyyüb Sari from Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, won 2nd place in the Hardware Aware Efficient Training competition which took place during the ICLR 2021 workshop.

Congratulations!

Title: Essays on differential games with impulse control

Come support two GERAD students participating in the Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. The Polytechnique community is invited to vote for their favourite presentation until April 23, 2021!

• Solène Kojtych, Optimisation de boîtes noires discontinues : application à la conception d'aubes de turbomachines robustes aux interactions de contact

• Ludovic Salomon, Optimisation multiobjectifs de boîtes noires sous contraintes générales

The Faculty of Business Administration of Université Laval awarded this year to Leandro Callegari Coelho and Monia Rekik, from the Department of Operations and Decision Systems, the research medal. They have distinguished themselves by the national and international influence of the results of their research. The award of a medal is based primarily on publications in internationally recognized research journals that have a formal and rigorous peer review process.

Congratulations!

Title: Optimisation des hyperparamètres des réseaux de neurones profonds

Chun Cheng won the 2020 GERAD Best Thesis Competition for her thesis titled "Robust Optimization for Supply Chain Applications: Facility Location and Drone Delivery Problems". She was supervised by Yossiri Adulyasak at HEC Montréal and Louis-Martin Rousseau at Polytechnique Montréal.

Congratulations!

Sanae Lotfi, a graduate of the Master of research in applied mathematics, has received the Best Master’s Thesis Award of the Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal.

Sanae Lotfi's thesis, "Stochastic first and second order optimization methods for machine learning", was co-directed by professors Andrea Lodi and Dominique Orban.

Congratulations!

Here are the winners who will each receive a half-fellowship of $30,000:

• Shanshan Wang, candidate proposed by Leandro Coelho and Erick Delage;
• Lingxiao Wu, candidate proposed by Jean-François Cordeau and Yossiri Adulyasak.

Congratulations!

Congradulation to Professors Sébastien Le Digabel, Charles Audet, Andrea Lodi and Dominique Orban! This grant totaling $781,500 is a partnership with Huawei Technologies and will focus on "Numerical Optimization and Machine Learning".

Read the news.

Congradulations to Samuel Pelletier, a graduate of the HEC Montréal, who received the most prestigious recognition awarded to graduates of Canadian educational institutions, the Governor General of Canada’s Academic Gold Medal.

For more information.

This article, published in the prestigious journal Nature, shows that in France, many COVID-19 patients have not consulted or alerted public health to their condition, leading to problematic under-detection of cases. This study is based on a mathematical model, the parameters of which were optimized using the NOMAD software developed at GERAD by the team of professors Charles Audet and Sébastien Le Digabel and the research associates Viviane Rochon Montplaisir and Christophe Tribes. This blackbox optimization software has been in continuous development for over twenty years and represents the state of the art in derivative-free optimization.