Online Event: Practice of OR – sharing experiences, building networks

EURO Practitioners’ Forum (EPF) Online Event is an inspiring opportunity for meeting with OR and analytics practitioners from across Europe and beyond. Join us on gather.town, a website specialized on interactive online sessions, and make connections, learn, collaborate and share experiences of what works and what doesn’t when OR meets practice.

Programme includes: Plenary keynote, Parallel sessions, Networking session, Informal mingling and other

Deadline for registration: 19 February 2024, 17:00 CET

REGISTRATION

When you register, you will receive the link to our gather.town space. You’re welcome to drop in at any time pre-event: see the space taking shape, catch up on the programme details, and access resources and links to support OR practice. The platform lends it very well to also meet new acquaintances and make valuable connections during breaks.

Agenda:

• 13:00 – Welcome & Introduction
• 13:15 – Keynote speaker – Sémi Gabteni
• 14:15 – Coffee (bring your own)
• 14:30 – Networking session
• 15:30 – Break, but keep on networking
• 16:00 – Parallel presentation and discussion session
• 17:00 – Session summaries and closing remarks.

Keynote talk:

Data Science at the heart of Paris CDG baggage industrial initiative 

Speaker: Sémi Gabteni, Head of Data & Management Science, Groupe ADP

Groupe ADP is the company running ground logistics at Charles de Gaulle and several other airports, the talk will cover the practical value of operations research when running complex operations and how they use optimization for a wide spread of tasks at their company.

Baggage handling is key to an airport business performance. At major hub airports, it is critical, due to its ties with connection operations.  While connection operations drive complexity, so do the supporting infrastructures, processes, and many parties involved.

At Paris CDG, Groupe ADP has launched a so called “baggage industrial robustness programme”, in which Data and Data Science are a priority stream.  While the related Data Science roadmap spans over years, stakeholders buy-in is subject to frequent deliveries of industrial and measured improvements.

This results in a business oriented Data Science function; and the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics keep the organization focused on what can be leveraged before summer 2024.

This presentation exposes the drivers of bag handling complexity, a selection of data science challenges, while state-of-the-art is scarce. It also illustrates what is meant with ” business oriented”, the initial achievements of the Data Science roadmap and what lays ahead. Last, it shares key lessons learned so far.

Networking session:

With an aim on more interaction, in this session practitioners will discuss softer topics concerning the life of an OR Practitioner. This year among other topics we are including:

• Management of an OR Practitioner: Where is the best position of an OR practitioner in a non consulting company? Is your manager fully aware of OR techniques, or of what OR may do for the company business?
• Internal Recognition vs. External recognition: as an OR practitioner, are you seeking more internal recognition (inside your company or organisation) or the OR peers recognition (outside the company, such as OR societies). Are the two related?
• Coding quality

Parallel sessions:
As practitioners we have many things on our minds, and sharing opinions and thoughts on important issues is a great way to get inspiration and new perspectives. In the parallel sessions we will have discussions on a wide variety of topics, with short presentations followed by a round table discussion.

How to bring OR to its full potential in a multidisciplinary context? 
Creating real-world impact with OR requires multidisciplinary competences. Gathering those can be done in many ways, e.g. within- and cross-team collaboration, either on a temporary or long-term basis. Each of these comes with both challenges and opportunities. Think about, amongst others, avoiding knowledge-silos, reducing the so-called “bus factor”, a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members while delivering on a sustainable pace.

In this discussion session, we want to hear about your wins, challenges, and lessons learnt. Join us to share your learnings and get inspired by others!

Data Visualization

Data visualization can be a very efficient method of identifying patterns in data and communicating results to broad audiences. Good data visualization requires both creativity and careful consideration of the technical details. In this session, we’ll present guidelines for creating more effective visualizations and demonstrate ways in which charts can be designed to convey information more accurately. In the following roundtable discussion, participants will have the opportunity to debate whether those guidelines are always applicable and consider special cases where they may not be, as well as discuss ways in which they can improve their own data visualizations.

Explainable AI 

In many real-world applications, even today a lot of input data results from manual input and/or human judgement and thus is prone to all kind of human errors. Some of these input data errors might have a significant influence of the answer of the AI system. As it is too cumbersome for the end user to validate all input data beforehand, he or she usually needs some understanding of the AI system to trace back seemingly strange results to the input data errors that caused them. How can we support the end user in this task?

OR in the time of AI 

The success of large language models and machine learning is driving significant societal attention, research investment, and indeed effort in private companies towards how to best exploit AI. We’re seeing a number of initiatives on applying AI techniques in traditional OR topics, in some cases to the exclusion of tried and proven techniques. As operations researchers, how should we adapt to the situation and how can we talk about OR in the prevailing climate?

After the registration to the workshop, you are welcome to use the gather.town link at any time to set up your avatar, explore the space, catch up on the programme details, and access resources and links to support OR in practice. The space will remain available to workshop participants to meet each other, after the official close, if you want to keep the conversation going.

EURO Practitioners’ Forum aims to help develop supportive networks, support and assist OR practitioners, and in particular people whose primary purpose is applying OR in a business/government/charity or similar environment. We believe that practitioners can benefit enormously from networking, sharing experiences, learning from each other, and potentially collaborating with each other.

EPF past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Visit the website and register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EPF Member registration page

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