Since February 2021 until a few days ago, it has been an honor to serve the AIROYoung community as a joint coordinator and do it with Michele Barbato, Veronica Dal Sasso, Serena Fugaro, Giusy Macrina, and Lorenzo Peirano as a team.
The 8th AIROYoung Workshop has just ended, and we of AIROYoung are very enthusiastic and proud of how it went! Indeed, more than 70 Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers, and practitioners attended the workshop at the University of Calabria, from Wednesday February 14th to Friday 16th.
“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common.” – Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”
Finally, the first paper extracted from my Ph.D. thesis have been published in Discrete Applied Mathematics and is available online.
Finally, the article written together with Jean-François Côté and Renata Mansini, and born initially from my master’s thesis developed at the Université Laval in Québec City, has been accepted and published in the European Journal of Operational Research.
“The Italian translation of teaching is “insegnare,” which comes from the Latin “in+signāre,” namely, “to leave a mark.” The memory of our first contact with O.R. is a mark that we all are passionate about and share. Sometimes it can be love at first sight, but sometimes it does take longer to find the passion.” –
Finally the volume entitled “Operations Research and Data Science in Public Services”, dedicated to the 6th AIROYoung Workshop (February 23–25, 2022 – Rome, Italy), has been published in the AIRO Springer Series. Matteo Cosmi (University of Luxembourg), Lorenzo Peirano (University of Brescia), Marcella Samà (Roma Tre University), and I were the Special Volume editors of the volume, which contains five accepted contributions presenting both methodological and application-oriented results. For more details, check it out the preface we wrote to present them.
I am really glad to share that the first paper describing ROAR II, the second part of ROAR (Ricerca Operativa Applicazioni Reali), is now available online on INFORMS Transactions on Education: “An Operations Research–Based Teaching Unit for Grade 10: The ROAR Experience, Part II”.
At the beginning of February 2023, Alessandro Gobbi, Gabriella Colajanni, and I started a training course at the ITSOS Marie Curie Higher Secondary Education Institute in Cernusco sul Naviglio (Milan, Italy).
The 7th AIROYoung Workshop has just ended, and we of AIROYoung could not be happier.
Finally the paper entitled “An interdisciplinary experimental evaluation on the disjunctive temporal problem” has been published on Constraints! We submitted it in July 2022, and it was accepted at the beginning of January 2023.
The experimentation of the third and last unit of ROAR ended with a special event at Filtrec S.p.A.. Filtrec is a manufacturer known worldwide for the production and distribution of hydraulic filters. For the final project of ROAR III, the Operations Manager Emanuele Giliani described to us the problem of optimizing milk-run routes to visit contractors several times a week. We adapted and simplified the problem based on students’ skills. We implemented a first version of the model in the classroom. Then, every group had to independently formulate and implement a different family of constraints. Once put these together, we obtained and solved the final version by using historical data given by the company. Finally, students wrote a report and held a presentation at Filtrec headquarters in Telgate (Bergamo, Italy), where they also visited the factory and the warehouse.
Today we started the implementation of the third and last teaching unit of ROAR in the now Grade-12 class at IIS Antonietti in Iseo, Brescia. This unit is dedicated to the learning of Python and the PuLP library in order to implement and solve optimization problems. Overall, we are going to hold six lectures, the last one in January 2023.
Finally the paper entitled “Fostering students’ modelling and problem-solving skills through Operations Research, digital technologies and collaborative learning” has been published in the International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology! We submitted it in November 2021, and it was accepted at the beginning of August 2022.
On Tuesday October 4, I had the chance to hold two teaching seminars in Naples, Italy, for the OPS4Math project. OPS4Math is currently addressed to about 30 higher-secondary school teachers, having the main goal to promote problem-solving skills and optimization algorithms to improve the teaching of mathematics. With half of the teachers in the classroom and the other half remotely connected on Teams, I exploited some of the exercises developed in our ROAR project. In particular, the first seminar was about solving two-variable optimization problems by using GeoGebra (PDF), whereas the second seminar introduced graph theory by means of social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and presented classical optimization problems on networks, such as the Minimum Spanning Tree, the Shortest Path, and the Traveling Salesman problems (PDF).
Leiden, a city where it rains periodically all day; where an old large mill stands; where the canals and bridges are wonderful especially at night. A city that gave birth or hosted dozens and dozens of scientists and artists (including Lorentz, Huygens, Einstein, and Rembrandt), and that in the last week has also welcomed a hundred young researchers for EU TalentOn, as well as teenage students for EUCYS, both organized and funded by European Commission.
ODS2022 has already finished. It has been a really intense conference, full of interesting talks, discussions, and exchanges of ideas and experiences, as well as some nice social activities, such as the treasure hunt in the centre of Florence, organized by Viviamo in Positivo – Clownterapia.
Welcome to my personal website. I am planning to use this section to communicate news and thoughts. I still have to fill and customize some pages, but I am going to do it very soon.