Andrea Lodi is an Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion. He is a member of the Operations Research and Information Engineering field at Cornell University. He received his PhD in System Engineering from the University of Bologna in 2000 and he was a Herman Goldstine Fellow at the IBM Mathematical Sciences Department, NY in 2005–2006. He was a full professor of Operations Research at DEI, the University of Bologna between 2007 and 2015. Between 2015 and 2022, he has been the Canada Excellence Research Chair in “Data Science for Real-time Decision Making” at Polytechnique Montréal. His main research interests are in Mixed-Integer Linear and Nonlinear Programming and Data Science, having a significant publication record in the most prestigious journals and conferences of those fields. Andrea Lodi's work has received several recognitions including the IBM and Google faculty awards. Andrea is the recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society 2021 Farkas Prize. He serves in leading editorial positions, most notably, he is a co-Editor for Mathematical Programming and an Area Editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing. He has been the network coordinator and principal investigator of two large EU projects/networks, and, in the period 2006-2021, consultant of the IBM CPLEX research and development team. Andrea Lodi is the co-principal investigator of the project “Data Serving Canadians: Deep Learning and Optimization for the Knowledge Revolution,” 2017-2022, and the scientific co-director of IVADO, the Montréal Institute for Data Valorization.
Contents of this video:
0:00 - Intro
1:50 - Early years
12:45 - Learning OR from the big names
15:50 - On deciding to do a PhD
17:36 - Stories from the famous corridor in Bologna!
21:27 - Early research work on heuristics for packing and assignment problems
23:16 - Interest in Integer Programming and the influence of Matteo Fischetti
24:04 - On being the chauffeur of Egon Balas using Paolo Toth's car!
26:38 - Meeting Andrea during the 2008 Brazilian OR Conference in João Pessoa
27:45 - On giving it back to the OR community
29:19 - Transition from being a student to becoming a professor
31:18 - Improving the performance of MIP solvers
34:27 - The story of Local Branching
37:43 - Acting as scientific advisor for CPLEX
39:33 - Coding
41:35 - Constraint Programming and Combinatorial Optmization
44:31 - Recognizing the efforts of developing optimization software
47:41 - On the difficulty of devising generic optimization tools
51:00 - Moving to Montréal
53:22 - ML and Combinatorial Optimization
1:00:25 - IVADO
1:03:53 - Editorial activity
1:07:43 - Time management and spare-time activity
1:09:44 - Moving to the US and future work
