Zinal Winter School on

Data Science, Optimization and Operations Research

January 19 - 24, 2025

Hotel Europe, Zinal, Switzerland

Registration is now closed.

Katya Scheinberg

Georgia Tech

Katya
		      Scheinberg

Katya Scheinberg is a Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech she held positions at Cornell and Lehigh Universities and at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She attended Moscow University for her undergraduate studies and received her PhD degree from Columbia University. Katya\’s main research areas are related to developing practical algorithms (and their theoretical analysis) for various problems in continuous optimization, such as convex optimization, derivative free optimization, machine learning, quadratic programming, etc. She is an Informs Fellow, a recipient of the Lagrange Prize from SIAM and MOS, the Farkas Prize from Informs Optimization Society and the Outstanding Simulation Publication award from Informs Simulation Society. Katya is currently the editor-in-chief of Mathematics of Operations Research, and co-editor of Mathematical Programming. She is a Chair-Elect of the Mathematical Optimization Society.

Pierre Pinson

Imperial College London

Pierre
		      Pinson

Pierre Pinson is the Chair of Data-Centric Design Engineering at Imperial College London, Dyson school of Design Engineering, and Deputy-Head of the School. He is a Chief Scientist at Halfspace, as well as a Professor of Operations Research and Analytics at the Technical University of Denmark. He acts as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Forecasting. His focus areas cover forecasting, optimization and game theory, with power and energy systems as one of the main application areas. He has received the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award 2024 with Molslinjen and Halfspace, for OR and analytics application to passenger ferry operations. He is seen as a leading figure internationally within predictive analytics.

Transport and Mobility Laboratory

The course is organized by the Transport and Mobility Laboratory, EPFL.

EPFL

Zinal

Venue and accommodation

The winter school will take place at Hotel Europe in Zinal.

  • Welcome cocktail on Sunday at 18:30: main restaurant of the hotel.
  • Lectures and workshops: level -2 of the hotel, in the sport hall.
  • Coffee breaks: main restaurant of the hotel.
  • Banquet dinner on Thursday: main restaurant of the hotel.
  • We recommend the participants to stay at the hotel Europe. Book directly at the hotel, and mention that you are participating to the seminar. If you are not staying at Hotel Europe, you may want to join us for dinner. In that case, please mention it to the hotel.

ECTS

The course is worth 2 ECTS credits. The students who need to be evaluated to obtain the credit must inform the organizer during registration. In order to obtain the credit, the students must participate to the lectures, participate to the workshops, provide an oral presentation, submit a report. The students will be organized by groups. A scientific paper authored by one of the lecturers will be assigned to each group. During the workshops, the students will have the opportunity to interact with the author of the paper. An oral presentation of the paper by the group will be organized.

After the course, each student will prepare a technical report on a topic related to the course. The topic cannot be associated with the same lecturer as the paper presented during the workshop. This is personal work, and the topic should be approved by the lecturer during the workshop. The report should summarize the topic, provide a literature review, and a personal discussion about the topic (strengths and weaknesses, potential applications, possible extensions, etc.) The objective is to show that the students have understood the concepts, and are able to be critical about it. The report does not need to be long (about 10-15 pages).

The workload for the course is 15 hours of lectures, 8 hours of workshop, preparation of the presentations, report writing.

Lectures schedule

From To Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
8:30 10:00 Katya Pierre Katya Pierre Katya
10:00 10:30 Coffee break
10:30 12:00 Pierre Katya Pierre Katya Pierre
12:00 17:00 Sport and discussions
17:00 19:00 Workshop Workshop Presentations Presentations
19:00 Dinner

List of participants

  1. Bierlaire Michel, EPFL (CH)