📈 Attracting people to OR, LSO Summer School 2025, and reimagining OR

Local Optimum: short, imperfect-yet-useful ideas - Edition #11

Welcome to a new edition of Local Optimum: a short, imperfect-yet-useful collection of ideas related to optimization, decision-making, and applied Operations Research.

Let’s dive in! 🪂

1) 🧲 Attracting people to OR

There’s a rare opportunity to bring more people into Operations Research.

Not through its name.

Not through complex algorithms.

Not through mathematical equations.

But by showing an alternative to the crowded world of Data Science and the increasing pressure on businesses to do more with less, where OR becomes a competitive advantage.

2) ☀️ LSO Summer School 2025

If you’re in India from 16th to 21st of next June, you might consider attending to this summer school on large-scale optimization:

(click on the picture to go to the page)

3) 💡 Reimagining OR

Operations Research has historical systemic issues holding back its growth.

No matter where you start, it leads back to the same place… An inevitable negative feedback loop:

Limited adoption → few case studies → poor marketing → less awareness → low demand → small market → high costs → limited tools → limited adoption…

And it has consequences we’re still facing today.

Why is that? What’s the historical context? And what are the core challenges we must overcome?

Here’s the full breakdown 👇

📈 #50 Operations Research reimagined (Part I)

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Are you addressing large-scale optimization problems?

Next Monday, I’ll share the second post on the 6-post series titled “Where did the time go?”.

This time, the focus will be on scalability and I’ll give ideas on how to reduce the complexity of optimization problems with different techniques.

I’ll cover:

🌪️ What large-scale problems are
💡 Ideas to help solving them
👣 First steps to take

If you tackle this kind of problems, this will be useful. See you Monday!

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And that’s it for today!

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If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!

Have a nice day ahead ☀️

Borja.