Mathieu Besançon

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

TCS in a nutshell? 🙊

Same thing for academics: you're writing for that paper? Adds time. Working on the content, proofs, experiments? Adds time. Tweaking the latex template? Substrat time. Getting an LLM to mess up the template for you? Remove all the time budget.

Asking here in case: does anyone know a good jurist or lawyer in Germany specialized in citizenship, the precise requirements for applications? Not for me, and yes this is for an edge case of the standard procedures

I reviewed way too many papers this year. Frankly I would probably decline reviewing for a venue that explicitly puts the pressure of evaluating (and thus understanding) slop on the reviewers instead of the authors

And when I say I got Deutsche Bahned, I don't mean a cute little delay, I mean that I should be around Burgundy and I'm currently watching someone eat a Belgian waffle 🫠

@deutschebahn.com has Deutsche Bahned me again: insane delays but not enough to claim reimbursement, missed connection to an international train and left to fend for myself finding another connection Is it me or is network reliability getting *even* worse? Are there dashboards monitoring it?

And you'd think that a 45 min correspondence is enough to be safe, you'd THINK

Deutsche Bahn advertising *relaxed* trips on the screen while I spend 4 hours estimating our real delay and plausibility of my correspondence because their updates are systematically over-optimistic. Did not miss this 🫣

I get that @arxiv.bsky.social is under massive submission loads, but not all rules give good filters. Our paper got flagged for repeated text. Without more info, we can only guess that it is about restated things (w/ thm-restate). But it has the .tex source, it could check the source directly no? 🤔

I like living risky but receiving the dreaded "Changes of your trip" email from Deutsche Bahn, that's too much

Whatever we think of CS conf rankings, they are used by hiring committees, etc. The sub-domain bias is pretty striking on CORE. The few integer optimization conferences are now all rank B I believe. Searching for computer vision gives me a bunch of A* ones.

So have we reached the "Freedom Waffles" stage on every US menu already?

@proton.me I haven't found a definitive answer on the various forums, is there a way to "send as" in proton from another email (a professional email)? For academics that have 3+ email addresses this is essential

For academics organizing workshops: EasyChair or ScienceConf? I could cope with making a website separate from the CFP if needed.

For people speaking languages with a distinction of formal and informal "you", are you also looking up through piles of emails to see if you're on an informal basis with someone?

I'll be at the jump.dev workshop and SIAM OP26 in Edinburgh! Come say hi to chat on computational optimization, constrained first-order methods, or hunt down the best specialty coffee and bouldering gyms in town!

Pretty late to the party, but I was honored to receive the Robert Faure prize 2026 from the French Operations Research Society! matbesancon.xyz/post/2026-04...

Yeah sure AGI but when will train platforms apply reduction cards correctly on a trip?

Inria (sadly not here yet) will be preparing candidates for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Program scholarships. The institute also centralized a whole list of hosting teams (including GHOST, mine!) with potential topics: www.inria.fr/en/marie-skl...

Les Grenoblois quand les Lyonnais viennent en rando en chaussures bateau et chino

Don't get me wrong I have nothing against doing that theoretical upper bound research. The drama is that I struggle to find real improvements to maxflow (or more generally flow?) algorithms that came from this theoretical progress. Isn't that one role that theoretical algorithmic should fill?

Early Christmas for MIP folks!

The SCIP 10 optimization suite has many new interesting features and is fully open source. For binaries and downloads, check www.scipopt.org/index.php#do...

I got hyped and then read the last line 😑

Probably my lazy french brain but some journal allowing delays in paper reviews for "exceptional personal circumstances (e.g. vacation)" gets my teeth grinding hard 😬 Of course with 3 vacation days per year I guess that falls into exceptional

Barely have a permanent position and already called old by the new generation, academia is brutal

- Mixed-integer optimization is so second-nature to us operations researchers, it's easy to forget most people approach their combinatorial problems through polyhedral relaxations - and conic formulations, of course - of course

Very clear and bold welcome speech by Prof. Laudani from the city of Bologna council at #ECAI25!

Gosh I hit the second root

Life goal: being so good at extreme irony-ing you get second degree burns

BTW if you're at the conference and looking for your next research adventure in computational optimization, come say hi!