I attended the European Safety and Reliability (ESREL) and Society for Risk Analysis Europe (SRA-E) conference in Stavanger, Norway, in June. The conference lasted five days, and it was also my first-ever trip to Norway. Joining me at the conference were my dissertation supervisor and two other doctoral researchers from the Systems Analysis Laboratory. This was the first time during my doctoral studies that I took part in a multi-day event abroad.
I gave a presentation on my own research titled “Balancing downtime and maintenance costs for multi-component systems with economic and structural dependencies.” My talk prompted several questions from the audience. I also listened to many other presentations and discussions, particularly on maintenance and artificial intelligence. I was especially impressed by the talks given by Enrico Zio and Piero Baraldi. In addition, I got to see presentations from researchers whose names I recognized from articles I’ve read—it was nice to finally put faces to those names.
Attending the conference was a positive experience, as the event was very well organized. For example, the conference dinner was memorable, held in a large tent by the sea. I also met many new people. However, I did not start any research collaborations, as my dissertation is already at an advanced stage.
Sharing my experiences,
Jussi Leppinen, FORS Secretary
The International Conference on Stochastic Programming (ICSP) brought together many optimization professionals from around the world to present their research in Paris from July 26 to August 1. The conference began, as is tradition, with two days of tutorial sessions, where leading experts gave extended lectures on their research topics. Among these, Wolfram Wiesemann’s lecture on solution and approximation methods for robust optimization was particularly memorable.
The main conference took place from July 28 to August 1, with nearly all the field’s top researchers in attendance. I was especially impressed by Marc Goerigk’s talk on the intersections of robust and bilevel optimization, as well as Jannis Kurtz’s presentation on K-adaptability in robust optimization. A small disappointment was that my own presentation, “Solving Influence Diagrams with MILPs – Recent Advances and Future Directions,” was scheduled at the same time as a talk by the legendary Terry Rockafellar, so I was unable to hear his presentation. Judging from the conference topics, current research trends center on solution methods for distributionally robust optimization and the interface between machine learning and robust optimization. The week also featured many interesting applied talks, such as those on energy systems and logistics planning.
The conference also offered a variety of social activities. I took part in a soccer tournament, which our team won, and attended the conference dinner. On Wednesday afternoon there was also an optional excursion to the nearby Château de Fontainebleau. Naturally, the highlights of the conference were the many new acquaintances I made and the engaging hallway conversations on different topics. The next ICSP will be held in Hong Kong in 2028—I hope to be there as well.
Topias Terho, Vice Chair of FORS