Three keynote speakers at the conference who confirmed their participation are distinguished professors Marc Sevaux, Yuri Nesterov and Ozren Despić.
Marc Sevaux is a professor in Operations Research at the Université Bretagne Sud (Lorient, France). From 2008 to 2010 and from 2016 to 2020, he was the deputy head of the Lab-STICC laboratory site (CNRS UMR 6285) at UBS. As of January 2021, Professor Marc Sevaux is the President of the EURO. He was also a member of the EURO-K Conference Program Committee (Rhodes Island, Greece in 2004 and Vilnius, Lithuania in 2012) and Chair of the EURO /INFORMS Conference Program Committee in Rome, in July 2013. He is the coordinator of the EURO Working Group EU/ME metaheuristic community (with Kenneth Sörensen). His research area focuses on the design of optimization methods (such as heuristics, metaheuristics, matheuristics and more recently the combination with learning techniques) for combinatorial optimization problems (Logistics, Routing, Planning and Scheduling).
Yurii Nesterov is the world’s leading authority on the efficiency of algorithms for continuous optimization. Since 1993, he has been working at UCLouvain, specifically in the Department of Mathematical Engineering from the Louvain School of Engineering, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics. His text, Interior-Point Polynomial Algorithms for Convex Programming, co-authored with A. Nemirovskii, utilized the theory of self-concordant functions to unify global complexity results obtained for convex optimization problems including linear, second-order cone and semidefinite programming. In 2000, Nesterov received the Dantzig Prize, jointly awarded by the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, in recognition of his contributions to the theory of convex optimization. In 2009, Nesterov won the John von Neumann Theory Prize, while in 2016, Nesterov received the EURO Gold Medal.
Ozren Despić is a professor at the Aston Business School, Operations & Information Management, Aston University, UK. His main research focus is on developing mathematical models for their use in efficiency measurement and decision making. Investigating their theoretical properties and applicability in different contexts is one aspect of that research while the other one, equally important, is in the direction of making these models simpler and easier to understand by practitioners. The following list further narrows down the his areas of interest: Data Envelopment Analysis and Performance Measurement; Composite Indicators and Aggregation Operators; Multi-criteria and Soft Decision Analysis; Machine Learning and Optimisation.
