The U. S. National Science Foundation AI Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT) is proud to announce that its director, Pascal Van Hentenryck, has been invited as a plenary speaker at the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting, one of the premier global gatherings for operations research and analytics professionals.

Van Hentenryck’s talk on Wednesday, October 29 from 11 a.m. ET to 12 p.m. ET, titled “Learning to Optimize: Foundations and Industrial Impact,” will explore how advances in machine learning can transform the way optimization problems are solved in complex, real-world systems.

Learning to Optimize in Practice

In many industries, optimization problems must be solved repeatedly under changing conditions, from electrical power grids and manufacturing systems to transportation networks and global supply chains. The scale and volatility of these challenges have outpaced traditional optimization approaches.

Van Hentenryck’s plenary will present new methodologies for fusing machine learning with optimization, creating optimization proxies that produce near-optimal, feasible solutions at unprecedented speed. His talk will highlight how supervised learning and reinforcement learning can be combined with classical optimization to meet real-time industrial constraints while preserving theoretical rigor.

These approaches are already demonstrating transformative impact across domains such as grid optimization, supply chain management, logistics, and mobility, showcasing the power of AI-driven optimization to solve society’s most complex infrastructure challenges.

About Pascal Van Hentenryck

Pascal Van Hentenryck is the director of AI4OPT, the director of Tech AI (the AI Hub at Georgia Tech), and the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.