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.

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)

Finally, Brendan O'Donoghue (DeepMind, not pictured) gave an overview of some of the recent successes of Google DeepMind in terms of using reinforcement learning and generative AI to solve challenging problems like the Mathematics Olympiad as a step towards artificial general intelligence.

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...

Seventh, Pierre Pinson (Imperial, not pictured) investigated trading strategies for price-taking participants in energy markets as studied in "Distributionally robust trading strategies for renewable energy producers" pierrepinson.com/wp-content/u...

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....

Second, Nitish Jain (LBS, not pictured) talked about the role that expiry dates play in food waste and policies for mitigating food waste as discussed in "Until Later is Preferred Over Sooner: Multiplicity in Product Expiration Dates and Food Waste in Retail Stores" 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 ""

I have not 🤯 🤯

We also develop new convex relaxations for low-rank problems, via Shor relaxations.

Our original relaxations involve matrices of size n^2 x n^2, which is not tractable. However, we show how to make our relaxations block decomposable, and thus tractable, for several applications.