26 Nov

COIN-OR Cup 2016 Winners Announced

The 2016 COIN-OR Cup is awarded to Giacomo Nannicini (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center) and Thomas Wortmann (Singapore University of Technology and Design) for their contributions to model-based optimization for architectural design. The twelfth annual cup was awarded based on the RBFOpt and Opossum packages developed by the awardees.

RBFOpt has been in COIN-OR since 2015 and is a python library for blackbox global optimization in settings where the objective function is computationally expensive to evaluate. Opossum is a plugin for Grasshopper — a generative design language popular among architectural designers — that provides a GUI to RBFOpt.

This year’s committee commended the awardees for their simultaneous valuable contribution to COIN-OR and effective use of COIN-OR software. By lowering the barrier to entry, RBFOpt and Opossum are bringing state-of-the-art optimization to new communities and exciting classes of problems.

This year’s Cup was awarded at a celebration at the Flying Saucer in Nashville, Tennessee, during the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

2016 COIN-OR Cup Committee:

  • Joey Huchette, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Jeffrey Linderoth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Miles Lubin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Stefan Wild (chair), Argonne National Laboratory
07 Nov

2016 COIN-OR Cup Competition, Deadline Extended to October 14

Announcing the twelfth annual “COIN-OR Cup” competition, sponsored by the COIN-OR Foundation.

Guidelines:
* A submission or nomination must contain:
1. a synopsis of an effective use of COIN-OR or valuable contribution to COIN-OR (or both!),
2. an explanation of its significance.

* The winner must accept the prize in person at the 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting so we can all celebrate appropriately (see “Celebration” below).

* Submission deadline: Friday, October 14th, 2016.

* Self-nominations are welcome.

* We especially encourage nominations of effective use of COIN-OR that the community may not know about.

Celebration: The 2016 COIN-OR Cup will be awarded at a celebration during the INFORMS Annual meeting in Nashville, TN. All entrants, their supporters, and other interested parties are welcome to join the celebration and regale, rile, and roast the prize winners. The celebration will take place Monday, November 14, 7:30 pm at the Flying Saucer, 111 10th Ave. S. 310, Nashville TN 37203. Details of the
winning entry will be announced at this celebration event, and posted on the COIN-OR Cup website. Please e-mail your submissions to coin-cup@
coin-or.org.

Details of the winning entry will be announced at this celebration event, and posted on the COIN-OR Cup website
https://www.coin-or.org/coinCup
Please e-mail your submissions to coin-cup at coin-or.org.

2016 COIN-OR Cup Committee:
Stefan Wild (chair), Argonne National Laboratory
Joey Huchette, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jeffrey Linderoth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Miles Lubin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

07 Nov

RBFOpt – A New Library for Black-box Optimization

RBFOpt is a library written in Python for black-box (also known as derivative-free) optimization. It is a global solver that requires zero-order information – just function values, not even gradients! RBFOpt is aimed at finding the global minimum in a small number of function evaluations, which is particularly useful when each function evaluation requires an expensive computation, e.g. a time-consuming computer simulation.