The 18th edition of the annual conference of the EUROPT working group of EURO, the EUROPT Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization –EUROPT 2021– has been held virtually from July 7 to 9, 2021, organized from Toulouse, France, and hosted at ENAC-–École Nationale de l'Aviation Civile: https://europt2021.recherche.enac.fr/
Since 2000, this conference has been held every year and is one of the major events in the European mathematical optimization community. In 2020, the conference was expected to take place at ENAC, Toulouse, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Organizing Committee and the EUROPT Managing Board decided to postpone it to 2021 while maintaining its original location. The evolution of the situation and the difficulties that had persisted throughout the year 2021 in international travels, had finally led to the choice of a virtual format.
EUROPT 2021 has then been really special in many ways: for the first time, the event has been held in a fully virtual format, and for the first time attendance has been free of charge, thanks to the support of sponsors. Despite the format change, the Organizing Committee worked to set up an event promising to be a not-to-miss opportunity for stimulating (virtual) discussions on the latest developments in continuous optimization. The Program Committee, chaired by Sonia Cafieri (ENAC, Toulouse), was composed by 31 EUROPT members, including the EUROPT Managing Board, as well as some EUROPT Fellows and EUROPT Past and Honorary Chairs. The Organizing Committee was composed by 4 members from Universities in Toulouse, France (ENAC, Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse, and LAPLACE-INPT-ENSEEIHT) plus a staff member of ENAC for administrative support.
Registered participants were 295 from 37 countries. Among these participants, 68 were graduate students. This special edition had the honour to award both the EUROPT Fellow 2020 and the EUROPT Fellow 2021, who both delivered their lectures. The recipient of the 2020 EUROPT Fellowship was Manlio Gaudioso, Professor at the Universitá della Calabria, Italy, and the recipient of the 2021 EUROPT Fellowship was Monique Laurent, Professor at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, and Tilburg University, Netherlands.
Beyond the two EUROPT Fellowship Lectures, two other plenary lectures were delivered by Martine Labbé, Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and Oliver Stein, Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. The scientific program consisted in exactly 200 talks covering all aspects of continuous optimization, and organized in invited and contributed streams.
All the articles of this special issue were authored by participants at the Workshop and represent a sample of research activities discussed during the event. The submitted manuscripts were accepted for publication after a regular and rigorous refereeing procedure, under full control of the Optimization Methods and Software Editorial Board. This special issue includes 9 articles from various topics ranging from theoretical issues and algorithms including variational inequalities, games, sparse optimization, first-order large-scale optimization, and stochastic optimization to applications.
Actually, the articles are not all included in this issue. Indeed, some of them appeared in previous issues due to a publishing error. The table of contents with the complete list of articles is provided, together with the corresponding references, at the end of this preface.
The guest editors would like to thank the editorial board members of Optimization Methods and Software and the referees for handling all the papers submitted to the special issue. A special thanks goes to the Editor-in-Chief Stefan Ulbrich for supporting and facilitating the realization of this special issue project that was initially discussed and validated in 2020 with the much regretted Editor-in-Chief Oleg Burdakov.
We wish the readers to enjoy this special issue. We hope that the interest the readers will find in the articles will encourage them to join the EUROPT community and its future activities.
Giancarlo Bigi
Universitá di Pisa, Italy
Sonia Cafieri
ENAC, Université de Toulouse, France
Nicolas Couëllan
ENAC, Université de Toulouse, France
Sophie Jan
Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse, Université de Toulouse, France
Frédéric Messine
LAPLACE, ENSEEIHT, Toulouse INP, Université de Toulouse, France
Table of contents
Current issue
| - | Gwenaël Samain, Sebastien Bouguignon, and Jordan Ninin, Techniques for accelerating Branch-and-Bound algorithms dedicated to sparse optimization. | ||||
| - | Artem Agafonov, Dmitry Kamzolov, Pavel Dvurechensky, Alexander Gasnikov, and Martin Takac, Inexact Tensor Methods and Their Application to Stochastic Convex Optimization. | ||||
| - | Giovanni Giallombardo, Manlio Gaudioso, and Jean-Baptiste Hiriart-Urruty, Dual formulation of the sparsity constrained optimization problem: application to classification. | ||||
Volume 38, 2023–Issue 4
| - | Aviv Gibali, Kay Barshad, and Simeon Reich, Unrestricted Douglas-Rachford algorithms for solving convex feasibility problems in Hilbert space, pp. 655–667. This paper is part of the special issue of EUROPT 2021 Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization [https://doi.org/10.1080/10556788.2022.2157003]. | ||||
Volume 38, 2023–Issue 5
| - | Annamaria Barbagallo, and Serena Guarino Lo Bianco, Infinite dimensional tensor variational inequalities with applications to an economic equilibrium problem, pp. 1058–1080. This paper is part of the special issue of EUROPT 2021 Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization [https://doi.org/10.1080/10556788.2023.2192494]. | ||||
Volume 38, 2023–Issue 6
| - | Mauro Passacantando, and Fabio Raciti, A finite convergence algorithm for solving linear-quadratic network games with strategic complements and bounded strategies, pp. 1105–1128. This paper is part of the special issue of EUROPT 2021 Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization [https://doi.org/10.1080/10556788.2023.2205644]. | ||||
| - | Alexander Mitsos, Susanne Sass, Angelos Tsoukalas, Ian Bell, Domink Bongartz, and Jaromil Najman, Towards Global Parameter Estimation Exploiting Reduced Data Sets, pp. 1129–1141. This paper is part of the special issue of EUROPT 2021 Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization [https://doi.org/10.1080/10556788.2023.2205645]. | ||||
| - | Pavel, Dvurechensky, Artem Vasin, Alexander Gasnikov, and Vladimir Spokoiny, Accelerated gradient methods with absolute and relative noise in the gradient, pp. 1180–1229. This paper is part of the special issue of EUROPT 2021 Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization [https://doi.org/10.1080/10556788.2023.2212503]. | ||||
| - | Mercedes Pelegrìn, Claudia D'Ambrosio, Rémi Delmas, and Youssef Hamadi, Urban Air Mobility: From Complex Tactical Conflict Resolution to Network Design and Fairness Insights, pp. 1311–1343. This paper is part of the special issue of EUROPT 2021 Workshop on Advances in Continuous Optimization [https://doi.org/10.1080/10556788.2023.2241148]. | ||||