Alexander Helber

I got a very special gift yesterday, on the occasion of my 25th ("silver") PhD anniversary: my team crafted a silver doctoral hat with many references to our time together 💜

New internship + PhD offer on optimization and transportation, fully funded! Come work with us at the intersection of fun questions and important challenges!

Pax Pamir from @wehrlegig.games , had great fun and managed to squeak out a win (Our Tunisian drink coasters, bottom left, also go great with the map)

Perhaps in the future we will be fully post-writing. But today, every time you share a result you're excited about and a significant amount of the writing is slop, it's embarrassing.

A cutthroat business game about the dramatic rise of the opium trade in 19th-century China. Live now on Kickstarter. www.kickstarter.com/projects/col...

Just a visual presentation of EndoWake (joint work with Martina Fischetti)

In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today: + Ready to submit new paper - Paper from last year needs to undergo a *third* major revision Would have been nice to celebrate today and get the news tomorrow...

Looking for takes by TCS (Theoretical Computer Science) senior academics/researchers about AI and their discipline/research values. E.g., essays, detailed blog posts. (Specifically TCS: there is a lot from Maths, but while adjacent there are enough differences in culture it's worth distinguishing)

Third paper on ≈the same open question within days: this one is the third. The authors blatantly acknowledge their whole plan was to get and dump a ChatGPT proof on arXiv in ONE day to claim a result, and complain about being "scooped" by another group WHICH DID THE SAME THING Do you feel no shame?

I am begging you, stop using LLMs to write your papers it is horrible to read and causes an instant DNF.

There really should be a lot more shame attached to working for an Elon company

NeurIPS statement on the use of AI in the position paper track blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/a...

Sally Dong talked at the #mip2026 workshop about solving linear programs more efficiently by identifying underlying graphs associated with their constraint matrix. #orms 1/N

So one consistent thread is: we have no agency over our own behavior in the presence of temptation (zoning off during lectures, checking a phone in class, using gen AI), and that's your problem to solve. I know that structural interventions that reduce temptation are legitimate pedagogy but ugh.

'Beltsville Agricultural Research Centre', Maryland - I was privately commissioned to memorialise the BARC by a past employee after learning it will be shut down by the USDA after over 100 years of research. They wanted to focus of this aerial embroidery to be the field plots... 1/3 (see thread)

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

We have always had oral exams as part of our OM/MS PhD program @isenbergumass.bsky.social, with an oral exam being an important component of the core exam, the comprehensive exam, and also the dissertation proposal defense, plus the dissertation defense! apnews.com/article/coll...

13 PhD positions in in applied #maths, #orms, engineering, or CS within the ALMOA consortium -> study applications of European and international relevance in areas such as sustainable energy systems, green gogistics, etc. almoa.aau.at?page_id=53

It turns out, trains are very complicated and need simplification.. Today i had a look into a >300 page book on railway optimization and the idea of a train having to accelerate was only mentioned 10 times, none of them in the sections about operational optimization (so closest to "real physics"). 🚂

Question for #orms people: do you know any problem-specific cutting planes that are not too hard to explain and separate and would improve performance compared to a baseline MIP solver (e.g. SCIP, Gurobi)? Asking because its more fun for students if they implement something and it helps performance

ICE tear gassed a bunch of children on Saturday. This was a massive escalation of force. They were shooting tear gas at the back of the crowd, it took these unmasked people maybe 3-5 minutes in the cloud of tear gas to escape in without trampling. www.theverge.com/policy/87278...

Petition that Linkedin adds a "SLOP" button and if a some percentage of readers hit it, the poster gets prevented from posting for a time. I can't take another "Suddenly the conversation changes." and sentences with an average length of four words as if you had to turn in your brain when logging in.

in the morning, Eduardo Uchoa presented the development of branch-and-price for vehicle routing in our column generation class; in the afternoon, together with Marc Pfetsch, we discussed future developments in SCIP -- a happy and productive day for us computational optimizers #orms

Does there exist a commonly used public instance benchmark set for robust optimization? Or sets of instances which are frequently used within the literature?

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

The simplex algorithm is super efficient. 80 years of experience says it runs in linear time. Nobody can explain _why_ it is so fast. We invented a new algorithm analysis framework to find out.

I remember when I presented GCG 3.0 at the MIP conference in 2018, today Erik Mühmer introduces the new features of the next version #orms #or2025

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Tom Lehrer made all of his music 100% public domain so if seeing people sad about his death makes you want to check them out… it’s free. he wanted you to share them. tomlehrersongs.com

Presentation by David Treviño about Humanitarian Logistics at Doctors Without Borders today, organized by Lorena Reyes Rubiano at the Chair of Data and Business Analytics @ RWTH Aachen

For those interested in Benders decomposition (one of my favorite topics), check this paper by Kaiwen Fang, Inho Sin, and (the amazing) Geunyeong Byeon arxiv.org/abs/2506.03561