STOR-i Annual Conference 2025

The STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training hosted their eleventh annual conference on 9th-10th January 2025 with speakers from Statistics, Operational Research and Industry. This was the first conference I have ever attended and it was a wonderful experience.

With speakers from academics and working professionals in the UK and worldwide, there were a variety of talks in Statistics and Operational Research, both in academia as well as industry. Bringing together researchers, students and industry professionals interested in similar fields, I had the opportunity to meet like-minded academics and learn more about the different areas of research that they focus on.

There was also a poster presentation delivered mainly by PhD students of the STOR-i programme which showcased the work being carried out in several areas of OR and statistics at STOR-i. It was inspiring and exciting to see the variety of research that is being conducted in collaboration with strategic partners such as the Naval Postgraduate School, Northwestern University, etc. and also industrial partners such as Tesco, BT, etc.

Two talks that stood out to me personally were those delivered by Dries Goosens of Ghent University and Maria Paola Scaparra from the University of Kent. Dries Goosens presented his research on Sports scheduling with a team to categorise sports scheduling problems, generate a set of diverse and realistic benchmark instances along with an instance space analysis for solution methods for sports scheduling problems. Organising the messy variety of sports scheduling problems in the literature is an important step towards improving the quality and potential of research in the scheduling community. I also found that the methods of classification and categorisation of problems and instances could be extended not only to other timetabling problems such as University course timetabling and Nurse scheduling, but also to other related fields in Operational Research and Combinatorial Optimization such as Vehicle Routing Problems, Job scheduling problems, Assigment and Matching problems, etc.

Maria’s talk showcased the use of OR in real-world case studies with the theme of attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first case study demonstrated the use of data-driven models and interdisciplinary methods in finding optimal flood mitigation strategies for Vietnamese cities. The second case study involved healthcare projects in Africa using OR to improve health services in refugee camps of Ethiopia as well as ambulance services in South Sudan. It was inspiring to see the power of OR in transforming the lives of people as well as realistic challenges faced during the progress of building a sustainable future. Indeed, it is work like this that inspired me to undertake further study in OR and statistics.

It was a brilliant first conference with the series of motivating and captivating talks and discussions over the two days. Furthermore, I was deeply inspired by the room of like-minded individuals who were keen to develop scientific ideas, share them and discuss potential future ideas that could be explored. This air of inspiration has left me keen for the next STOR-i conference and other conferences in the future!