Cornell Hosts Twelfth Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization
The conference, organized in Ithaca by Professor David Williamson, attracted scholars who work on the theory, computation and applications related to allocating scarce resources that can only be used in discrete (i.e. whole number) quantities.
The conference, organized in Ithaca by Professor David Williamson, attracted scholars who work on the theory, computation and applications related to allocating scarce resources that can only be used in discrete (i.e. whole number) quantities.
The event, which took place June 25 - 27 on the Cornell campus, saw the presentation of 36 papers in a single stream of sessions. More than 85 researchers attended from many different countries in addition to the US, including Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, France and Chile. In addition to the technical sessions, the conference included a banquet at Cornell's Laboratory of Ornithology.
The papers have been published by Springer in a Proceedings in the series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, co-edited by Professor Williamson and Professor Matteo Fischetti of the University of Padova, Italy, the Program Committee Chair.
ORIE faculty members Eric Friedman and David Shmoys presented papers at the conference, as did Retsef Levi, a recent ORIE Ph.D. graduate now on the faculty of MIT's Sloan School of Management.
Professor Friedman's paper gives an efficient (i.e. polynomial) algorithm to find vertices on each facet of a polytope (the generalization to an arbitrarily large number of dimensions of a polygon, which has edges, or a polyhedron, which has facets, i.e. faces) given only information about how vertices are connected to each other.
Professor Shmoys, with Mauro Sozio of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, presented algorithms to obtain nearly optimal solutions to problems in which scheduling decisions that are to be made in a first stage constrain scheduling decisions that can be made in a second stage, after random events have occurred.
Professor Levi collaborated with Andrea Lodi of the University of Bologna, Italy, and Maxim Sviridenko of IBM on algorithms to minimize the inventory costs of restocking and holding multiple items in systems that have a limited production capacity.