Corvinus hosted the 10th VOCAL Optimisation Conference

The event event which took place between June 5-7 was supported by the Corvinus University of Budapest, the Hungarian Operational Research Society (MOT), EURO – Association of European Operational Research Societies and EUROpt WG, the Continuous Optimization Working Group of EURO. 

The nearly 100-strong participant came from 13 different countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and United Kingdom). 

The conference featured four keynote plenary speakers on a variety of topics. Daniel Kuhn (College of Management of Technology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) gave a presentation on “Distributionally Robust Linear Quadratic Control”. Máté Matolcsi (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Rényi Institute) gave a talk on “Linear Programming Bounds for Problems in Discrete Geometry”, while François Glineur (Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, Catholic University of Louvain) spoke on estimating the efficiency of optimization methods.  

(Pictured from left to right: Giancarlo Bigi, chair of the PC, Merve Bodur, EURO plenary speaker, Sarah Fores, EURO representative, Tibor Illés, chair of the ISC, 7 June 2024.)  

The EURO-supported plenary speaker, Merve Bodur (Operational Research, School of Mathematics, The University of Edinburgh), discussed theoretical and practical issues of decision making under uncertainty in her presentation “Decision Rules for Sequential Decision-making Under Uncertainty”.  

The conference featured 27 sessions with a total of 79 half-hour presentations on various topics in operations research, such as approximation algorithms, interior point algorithms, decision theory, game theory, combinatorial optimization and stochastic programming. Corvinus University of Budapest was represented at the conference with a total of 18 participants. The event was organized by the Corvinus Centre for Operations Research, Corvinus Institute of Advanced Studies and several members of the Department of Operations Research and Actuarial Sciences, namely Tibor Illés, Marianna Eisenberg-Nagy, Csaba Kolos Ágoston, Petra Renáta Rigó and Anita Varga. The opening speech of the international conference was given by Zoltán O. Szántó, dean of Corvinus Institute of Advanced Studies, academic vice-rector of Corvinus University. In his speech, he highlighted the achievements of Corvinus University in operations research and the past, present and future of the field at our university.  

In keeping with the tradition of the conference, one of our sponsors, MOT, presented the Jenő Egerváry Award at the conference dinner. 

The winner of the 2024 Egerváry Award was Professor Aurél Galántai (left in the piture), whose work was praised by our colleague Miklós Pintér (right in the picture), a member of the MOT board. (In the foreground is Zsolt Darvay.) 

The conference provided an excellent opportunity for networking between researchers in the field of operations research. It was a great opportunity for participants to exchange ideas, discuss new research and explore opportunities for collaboration. After the plenary presentations and the breakout sessions, several informal discussions and debates took place, which also contributed to a friendly and productive atmosphere.