📈 Want to be featured here?, RL Summer School, An interview to…

Local Optimum: short, imperfect-yet-useful ideas - Edition #16

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) 🎉 Want to be featured here?

I’m celebrating I already posted 100 articles in Feasible!

So I'm creating a special celebration issue featuring 100 submissions, a community showcase of cool work in our field: companies, side projects, conferences, courses, research, anything pushing optimization forward..

I call it 100x100 because I’m super creative with names 😅

But what’s in it for you? Each feature gets a short blurb + link so folks can find you later.

This is how it works: you submit your project ➡️ I feature it ➡️ you share the issue when it goes live. That’s it.

Deadline is tomorrow afternoon!

2) 🏖️ RL Summer School

I started feeling interest in Artificial Intelligence the first time I saw Reinforcement Learning in action.

It was in a Coursera course from the University of Alberta (great course btw), and then when I focused on RL during my Saturdays.AI course (great experience too).

The thing is I saw a link with the optimization space.

Regardless of the techniques, you want to maximize a cumulative reward function, so it touched my heart.

If you want to enter the field, this RL Summer School in Barcelona two years ago has all its content for free.

Enjoy!

3) 🤖 An interview to…

ChatGPT!

Time goes by so fast… Remember the early days of ChatGPT?

I shared it with everyone, and being in one of my cousin’s house we were playing with it, making it saying silly things.

We couldn’t imagine the level of intelligence it currently has.

And I even run a experiment here in Feasible: I interviewed ChatGPT to see its own understanding of the Operations Research field.

It was back in December 2022, right before I stopped writing for several months in a row.

(but here we are now!)

If you want to read what ChatGPT had to say about Operations Research back then…

#6 📈 I did an interview with ChatGPT about optimization... And yes, it's amazing

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Algorithms and parallelization: why some are more suitable than others?

I’m continuing the Where did the time go? series of posts this next Monday.

This time, we’ll cover:

🚫 Why some algorithms won’t thread
🫶🏻 Algorithms that love extra cores
🛠 My own experience parallelizing metaheuristics

If you want to understand how to get the most out of your machine, this will be useful. See you Monday!

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And that’s it for today!

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Have a nice day ahead ☀️

Borja.