When Russia wrote their national anthem, the words changed but the song remained the same as the Soviet one.

Today, grants are being cancelled for using the word "inequality" in the abstract (ax<=b). Maybe we can look to history for how to proceed.

E.g., how dynamic programming got its name.

Hidden gems in OR/MS: "L. V. Kantorovich: The Price Implications of Optimal Planning"
www.jstor.org/stable/2727266

Duality theory was almost discovered in the Soviet Union in the 1940s by Kantorovich. His research was halted for ideological reasons.

We concluded the conference with a dinner at Worcester College which made me feel like I was in The Great Hall of Harry Potter!

Looking forward to the conference next year (location to be announced)

Eight, Paul Goulart (Oxford) talked about the Clarabel.jl solver for conic programs, and discussed how explicitly formulating quadratic programs in a quadratic way (rather than reformulating them as SOCPs) can improve the performance of an interior point method github.com/oxfordcontro...

Sixth, my colleague Gah-Yi Ban (Imperial College Business School) analyzed a retailer that provides an online sharing economy as analyzed in the working paper "Personalized Assortment Optimization for a Subscription Business Model of Experience Goods
" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Fifth, Neil Walton (Durham) discussed modeling the NHS waitlist as a queueing system and analyzed how the UK Labour Party's pledge that most patients should have access to elective procedures within 18 weeks is going (TL:DR there is progress, not enough to meet the pledge within the current term) .

Fourth, Stefan Scholtes (Cambridge) talked about market power in drug supply chains as studied in catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10...., ending with a call for other researchers to also investigate the long-run implications of creating non-for-profit drug manufacturers like Civica Rx

Third, Rouba Ibrahim (UCL) talked about threshold policies for reducing the length of queues in queueing systems as discussed in "The Effects of Information on Abandonment and Congestion in Non-Stationary Priority Queues
" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

First up we had a fascinating talk from Matthias Holweg (Oxford) on the role of generative AI (chat-GPT etc.) in academic research and right-sizing editorial policies, as discussed in ""

On 4 April, we had the pleasure of organizing the 2nd London Operations Research Day with Agni Orfanoudaki, Yi-Chun Akchen and Jean Pauphilet at Oxford. The conference took place at Worcester College; thx to Qube Research and Technology for sponsorship

A recap thread ⬇️ londonorday.github.io

Just finished reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Super interesting book! Made me think about the NeurIPS submission checklist.

Since 2021, the number of questions in the submission checklist has ballooned from 5 to 16. Is this another example of "everything bagel liberalism"?

Are you an Ops researcher in the London area (broadly construed)? Are you free on 4 April 2025? Consider signing up for the London OR day in Oxford: mailing list available at londonorday.github.io