Category Archives: General OR

Not specifically OR for natural resources

W(h)ither strategic applied OR?

The fate of strategic applied OR; W(h)ither Agriculture, Horticulture, Forestry, Fisheries, etc! Or w(h)ither not?

Lluis Plà, & Daniel L Sandars, Javier Faulin

There is long term economic decline in the biotic primary production industries as sources of employment and thus students. Globalisation adds its toll as the food chain concentrates into control by few multi-national companies. Long-term capacity building research investments are out of fashion in many national governments.

Do you believe this scenario is realistic

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Given this scenario do you believe it has important implications for the OR community

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1) Through farmers and fishermen society access many increasingly scarce ecosystems services, such as bio-diversity and clean water. Society doesn’t expect to pay so OR will not pay?
2) World population might yet hit 9 billion with many of our lives. For the first time in a generation food security has been thrown into question in the developed world. Are we back in business?
3) In the absence of a strong strategic governmental lead can the large companies with their vast data and financial resource take up the slack? That’ll never work, beyond some short term-tactical profit-maximising studies, with no regard to societal interests? Perhaps consumers and farmers will be king!
4) It maybe that it is supra-national organisations such as multi-nationals, the FAO or the EC to take the lead? That’ll never work because agriculture is so spatially heterogeneous and needs local knowledge?
5) When the last agricultural student has left university we will simply get applied biologists and mathematicians to collaborate. Rubbish! Multi-disciplinary collaboration does not lead to good interdisciplinary science?
6) Are e-tools and open-access journals the answer to maintaining critical mass and vitality in an increasingly sparse profession without the support of dedicated university departments and research establishments?

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Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN Conference

    Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN Conference

                              LION 3
                                  

                14-18 January, 2009. Trento, Italy

              More details and up-to-date information at
                www.intelligent-optimization.org/LION3

                                  
Building on the success of the previous editions we are organizing a new event for January 2009. The LION conference is aimed at exploring the boundaries and uncharted territories between machine learning, artificial intelligence, mathematical programming and algorithms for hard optimization problems. The main purpose of the event is to bring together experts from these areas to discuss new ideas and methods, challenges and opportunities in various application areas, general trends and specific developments.

The conference program will consist of plenary presentations, introductory and advanced tutorials, technical presentations, and it will give ample time for discussions.

Relevant Research Areas
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LION 3 solicits contributions dealing with all aspects of learning and intelligent optimization. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– Stochastic local search methods and meta-heuristics
– Hybridizations of constraint and mathematical programming with
meta-heuristics
– Supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning applied to
heuristic search
– Reactive search (online self-tuning methods)
– Algorithm portfolios and off-line tuning methods
– Algorithms for dynamic, stochastic and multi-objective problems
– Interface(s) between discrete and continuous optimization
– Experimental analysis and modeling of algorithms
– Theoretical foundations
– Parallelization of optimization algorithms
– Memory-based optimization
– Prohibition-based methods (tabu search)
– Memetic algorithms
– Evolutionary algorithms
– Dynamic local search
– Iterated local search
– Variable neighborhood search
– Swarm intelligence methods (ant colony optimization, particle swarm
optimization etc.)
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