On 9th-10th January 2025 I attended the Lancaster University STOR-i Annual Conference. The conference hosts a range of UK-and-internationally based academics, and I attended talks focused on a range of contemporary topics in Statistics and Operational Research and met with students and researchers with similar academic interests as I.
One talk of particular interest was given by Dries Goosens of Ghent University. His research is in Sports Scheduling, and he has been part of a team developing a categorisation of such problems with the aim of better choosing metaheuristics based on problem-specific features. I think that this will be an invaluable contribution to the field, providing structure in what can be a mess of problems and solutions, and would be useful in a range of other areas of OR such as vehicle routing.
I’m looking forward to attending the next conference and hopefully seeing some familiar faces!
