Over the previous week, DTU Management hosted the annual, 33rd EURO conference in collaboration with DORS.
EURO is the Association of European Operational Research Societies. Their aim is to promote Operations Research (OR), and one way they achieve this is through their series of conferences.
More than 3000 participants from all over the world attended this year’s conference opened with a welcome address by Provost Rasmus Larsen.
As always, the full breadth of OR was present in more than 60 parallel streams. The interaction with AI and Machine Learning was more in focus than previously, and so was the inclusion of Quantum OR. The conference was also marked by application-oriented sessions being more prominent than ever before, with many sustainability, health care and industrial applications.
Among the speakers were Professor Pascal van Hentenryck who spoke about his findings – using AI to improve the optimizing algorithm for operations research, and Professor Charles Corbett who reflected on the challenges when humans leave planning to machines and algorithms with a narrow focus on optimization, without being sensitive to sustainability and joy in the workplace.
As always, prizes were awarded to distinguished researchers, while the scientific program consisted primarily of plenary and keynote speakers, and parallel special sessions. From the perspective of DTU Management it is noteworthy that Professor Bissan Gaddhar, and Associate Professor Joe Naoum-Sawaya received the EURO Award for the Best EJOR Paper 2024 in the review category with “Optimisation problems for machine learning: A survey”.
Associate Professor Dario Pacino who organized the conference is happy with the way it went.
“Organizing EURO 2024 was a hard and very rewarding job.” He was particularly thankful for all the students and staff that volunteered to help and made the conference a great success.
One of the big changes in this year’s EURO from other years was the choice to cater fully vegetarian food, as Dario explains “EURO 2024 was hosted in a progressive university, situated in a country proud of pushing a way toward a sustainable future. With over 3000 participants, going vegetarian was the natural choice for us.”
Next year, the EURO conference will be held in Leeds.