Participating in the SIAM Optimization 2023: An Eye-Opening Experience

Hello there! We’re thrilled to look back on our recent experience exhibiting at the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) conference on Optimization held in Seattle, Washington. We have to say, it was a thoroughly enriching experience for us.

Being the creators of CoCalc: Collaborative Calculation and Data Science platform, we found the conference to be a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate our capabilities to a larger audience. We didn’t just stand there and talk about what we do; we interacted, learned, and found many opportunities to collaborate within the community.

Talks That Stood Out

There were several major talks during the conference that captured our full attention. We want to highlight the following:

• Optimization Applications and Challenges across Amazon Operations by Russell Allgor from Amazon. His talk gave fascinating insights into Amazon’s decision-making processes and how they utilize optimization problems to automate them. His explanation about the challenges in handling uncertainty was absolutely gripping.

• Acceleration of First-order Optimization Algorithms via Damped Inertial Dynamics by Hedy Attouch from Université Montpellier II. Her presentation on accelerating first-order algorithms for convex optimization was eye-opening, especially the concept of damped inertial dynamics.

• Convex-Composite Optimization by James V. Burke from University of Washington. His talk on the unification of theory and algorithms for a broad range of optimization problems was mind-blowing.