On September 10, 2026, our colleague Gioni Mexi (AISST/IOL) successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled “The Two Faces of Mixed-Integer Programming: Primal and Dual Progress” at the Technische Universität Berlin. In his research, Gioni Mexi works on the two fronts of mixed-integer programming, finding good solutions quickly and learning from infeasible subproblems. On the primal side, he develops two heuristics that find high-quality solutions efficiently. On the dual side, he advances conflict analysis, which turns encountered infeasibilities into constraints that...Read More
The paper “Convex mixed-integer optimization with Frank–Wolfe methods” by Deborah Hendrych, Hannah Troppens, Mathieu Besançon, and Sebastian Pokutta, from the Interactive Optimization at Learning Lab at ZIB and TU Berlin, has been selected as the Outstanding Paper of the Year 2025 of Mathematical Programming Computation (MPC), the leading journal for computational mathematical optimization, published in cooperation with the Mathematical Optimization Society. Mathieu Besançon has since joined Inria center at the Université Grenoble Alpes as a faculty member. Mixed-integer nonlinear optimization encompasses a broad class of problems...Read More
We warmly congratulate Jaap Pedersen on the successful defense of his dissertation, “Optimized Network Topology Design for Future Energy Infrastructure,” which he presented on July 9, 2026, at the Technical University of Berlin! In his thesis, Jaap Pedersen focuses on the development of cutting-edge mathematical models and solution algorithms for planning future energy infrastructures. At the forefront of his work are two innovative mathematical optimization tools that tackle complex planning tasks using algorithmic methods: FlyingSCIPJack: This tool combines Steiner tree...Read More
