Three keynote speakers at the conference who confirmed their participation are Prof. Ivana Ljubić, Prof. Yurii Nesterov, and Deputy Business Director Andrej Bregar, PhD.
Plenary lectures
Keynote speaker
Title of plenary lecture
Ivana Ljubić is Professor of Operations Research at WU Vienna. Prior to that, she was appointed at ESSEC Business School in Paris (2015-2026) and University of Vienna (2007-2015). She serves as Area Editor for Transportation Science and Associate Editor for Operations Research and Networks. She has also served as Guest Editor for the European Journal of Operational Research and the Annals of Operations Research, and is a former Chair of the INFORMS Telecommunications Section. Her research interests include network design, combinatorial optimization, optimization under uncertainty, and bilevel optimization. Her work focuses on the development of mixed-integer linear and nonlinear optimization methods for applications in telecommunications, transportation, logistics, data and distribution network design, and social networks.
Yurii Nesterov is a globally recognized expert in convex optimization and numerical mathematics. From February 2024 to February 2026, he was a research professor at Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary. Since 2026, he had joined Shenzhen Loop Area Institute (China) as a research professor. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics and since 1993 was affiliated with UCLouvain (Belgium) and its Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE). Prof. Nesterov is best known as the inventor of the “Nesterov accelerated gradient” method and one of the founding fathers of modern convex optimization. His outstanding contributions have been recognized by prestigious international awards: Dantzig Prize (2000), the John von Neumann Theory Prize (2009), the EURO Gold Medal (2016), and the WLA Prize (2023).
Andrej Bregar, PhD is the Deputy CEO of Informatika d.o.o., with more than two decades of experience in IT, R&D, and the energy sector. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maribor and has worked extensively on decision support systems, multicriteria decision-making, robustness analysis, and cybersecurity in energy-related infrastructures. Andrej Bregar has authored several scientific papers in these fields and regularly participates in international conferences. In his managerial role, he leads complex digitalization, interoperability, and cybersecurity projects, focusing on the integration of advanced IT solutions in the energy industry.
