2021

Andrea Lodi is selected as the winner of the 2021 INFORMS Optimization Society Farkas Prize

Andrea Lodi (Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Cornell Tech and Technion, USA and CERC, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada) received his PhD in 2000 from the University of Bologna and he has received the 2004 Herman Goldstine Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences by IBM TJ Watson. Prior to joining Cornell Tech in 2021, he was Canada Excellence Research Chair at Polytechnique Montreal (2015-2021) and Professor of Operations Research at the University of Bologna (2007-2015). Professor Lodi is currently Area Editor of INFORMS Journal on Computing and a former Editor in Chief of Optima. Other editorial appointments include Mathematical Programming, Mathematics of Operations Research, Management Science and Mathematical Programming Computation.

Andrea Lodi is a leader in the development of state-of-the-art solvers, practical applications of optimization, such as crew and vehicle scheduling, and water network design. His research on mathematical programming has generated important advancements in constraint programming, mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), and heuristics for mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). Professor Lodi was part of the IBM/CMUl team that developed the open-source BONMIN solver for MINLP, and he has been a regular contributor to commercial MILP solvers such as CPLEX. In addition to deterministic solvers, Andrea has developed numerous heuristics for MILP, most notably, the feasibility pump for MILP, which has been adopted as a standard heuristic in many commercial MILP solvers, and which he has extended to MINLP, including nonconvex MINLPs. Andrea has also worked on the intersection of local-search techniques and constraint programming. Most  recently, he has pioneered the integration of machine learning and optimization, including the application of machine-learning techniques to tune MILP solvers and more generally solve hard combinatorial optimization problems. He is a worthy recipient of the 2021 Farkas prize for his broad range of seminal contributions to the practice and theory of optimization.

Prize committee

Dorit S. Hochbaum (chair), Jesús A. De Loera, Sven Leyffer, Katya Scheinberg