Plenaries

Michael Trick is the Dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and Harry B. and James H. Higgins of Operations Research at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon. He received his doctorate in 1987 and has been at Carnegie Mellon since 1989.  His research interests are in computational integer programming, constraint programming, and applications in telecommunications, scheduling, and social choice.  He has consulted extensively with organizations such as Major League Baseball, the FCC, and many other firms on scheduling and optimization issues.  In 2002, he was President of INFORMS and he is the current President of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies, an umbrella organization of societies for which INFORMS is its US member.

Prof. El-ghazali Talbi received the Master and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science, both from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble in France. Then he became an Associate Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Lille (France). Since 2001, he is a full Professor at the University of Lille and the head of the optimization team of the Computer Science laboratory (CRISTAL). His current research interests are in the field of multi-objective optimization, parallel algorithms, metaheuristics, combinatorial optimization, cluster and grid computing, hybrid and cooperative optimization, and application to energy, logistics/transportation, bioinformatics and networks. Professor Talbi has a h-index of 43 and has to his credit more than 300 publications in journals, chapters in books, and conferences. He is the co-editor of five books. He was a guest editor of more than 10 special issues in different  journals (Journal of Heuristics, Journal of Parallel and Distributed  Computing, European Journal of Operational Research, Theoretical Computer Science, Journal of Global Optimization). He is the head of the INRIA Dolphin project.  He has many collaborative national, European and international projects. He is the co-founder and the coordinator of the research group dedicated  to Metaheuristics: Theory and Applications (META). He is the founding  co-chair of the NIDISC workshop on nature inspired computing (IEEE/ACM IPDPS). He served in different  capacities on the programs of more than 100 national and international  conferences. He is also the organizer of many conferences (e.g. EA’2005, ROADEF’2006, META’2008, IEEE AICCSA’2010, META’2014, MIC’2015).

Imed KACEM is Full Professor since 2009 at the University of Lorraine, France, in Computer Science. He is the Founder and the Head of LCOMS Laboratory of the University of Lorraine since 2013 (LCOMS is the Laboratory of Design, Optimization and Modelling of Systems). His scientific activity is in the Operational Research. More precisely, his contributions are related to the design of exact and approximate algorithms with a guaranteed performance for the NP-hard combinatorial problems. Such problems are mainly related to the scheduling theory. The applications are interdisciplinary and various (production, packing in electronic design, healthcare, transportation, information visualization…). His contributions have been published in referred journals (Algorithmica, Theoretical Computer Science, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Discrete Optimization, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Journal of Scheduling, Applied Mathematics and Computation, Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization,  Information Sciences, Computers & Industrial Engineering, RAIRO-Operations Research, IJPE, EJOR, 4OR, IJCIM, IJOR, IEEE/SMC Transactions, Computers & OR, …). These research activities have involved the supervision of 15 PhD theses as well as several selective projects (some of them have been funded by the ANR, the European Commission, the INTERREG, the CNRS, …). He serves as area editor or guest editor for several journals (Annals of Operations Research-Springer, Computers & Industrial Engineering-Elsevier, RAIRO-Operations Research, European Journal of Industrial Engineering, Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering-Springer, AutoSoft Journal-Taylor & Francis…) and he gave keynote speeches or pleanry tutorials for several conferences (IEEE/CIE40, Japon (2010); FUBUTEC2011, United Kingdom (2011); IEEE/CoDIT2013, Tunisia (2013); IEEE/ICSCS2013, France (2013); DASA2016, Tunisia (2016); CIE46, China (2016), ECC’16, Switzerland (2016); IEEE/CoDIT2017, Spain (2017); META2018, Morocco (2018); AFROS2018, Tunisia (2018); ROADEF2018, France (2018)). He chaired the program committee or the organizing committee of several international conferences (IEEE/ICSSSM06 (Troyes, 2006); IEEE/CIE’39 (Troyes, 2009); IEEE/CoDIT’14 (Metz, 2014); CIE’45 (Metz, 2015); IEEE/CoDIT’16 (Malta, 2016); ROADEF2017 (Metz, 2017); MOPGP2017 (Metz, 2017)). He obtained the « Great Award of Research 2010 » from the Universities of Lorraine, the 3rd Robert Faure Award 2009 from the French Society of Operational Research and Aid Decision (ROADEF), the 2015 Steffan Schwarz Award (Best Paper Award of the European Conference ECEC’2015 in Portugal), the Best Paper Award of IEEE/CoDIT2018 in Greece and he has regularly the PEDR or the PES Premium (with the highest level A) since 2006. ORCID Page: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6649-7257

Samir Elhedhli is Professor and Chair of the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo. He holds a BSc and MSc from Bilkent University and PhD from McGill University. He has research interests in Large-scale Optimization and Data Analytics with applications in Logistics, Supply chain, and Service Systems Design. His work has appeared in scientific journals such as Management Science, Mathematical Programming, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Computing,  IISE transactions, and European Journal of Operational Research among  others. He held grants from NSERC, CFI, OCE and MITACS and collaborated with industries in aircraft manufacturing, airline scheduling, and warehouse management. He served as president of the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) in 2011-2012.  He is currently the Education Chair and co-Editor-in-Chief of their flagship journal INFOR. He is the recipient of the CORS Service Award in 2013 and the University of Waterloo’s distinguished and outstanding performance awards in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012 and 2016.

James J. Cochran is Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Statistics, and the Rogers-Spivey Faculty Fellow in the Department of Information Systems, Statistics and Management Science at The University of Alabama. He earned a PhD in Statistics from the University of Cincinnati in 1997, and he has been a Visiting Scholar with Stanford University, the University of South Africa, the Universidad de Talca, Pôle Universitaire Léonard De Vinci, and the University of Limpopo. His research focuses on problems at the interface of statistics and operations research, and he has taught a wide variety of statistics and operations courses from the introductory undergraduate level through PhD seminars. Dr. Cochran is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and the Management Sciences and the Wiley Series in Operations Research and Management Science as well as the forthcoming Guide to the Analytics Body of Knowledge. He has published over forty research articles and a dozen book chapters, and he is coauthor of seven textbooks in statistics, operations research, and analytics. He has served as a consultant to a wide variety of corporations, government agencies, and not-for-profit organizations around the world, and he was a founding co-chair of Statistics without Borders and a member of the founding committee for INFORMS Pro Bono Analytics initiative. In 2008 Dr. Cochran received the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, in 2010 he received the Mu Sigma Rho Statistical Education Award, and in 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 2014 he received the American Statistical Association’s Founders Award, in 2015 he received the Karl E. Peace Award for outstanding statistical contributions for the betterment of society, and in 2017 he received the American Statistical Association’s Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award and was named a Fellow of INFORMS.