CO@Work 2020

CO@Work 2020 was a summer school organized by TU Berlin in cooperation with the Berlin Mathematical School and with support of the Berlin Mathematics Research Center MATH+.

This block course addressed master students (in their final year), PhD students, post-docs, and everyone else interested in the use of combinatorial optimization and mathematical programming in concrete applications from practice. The course schedule covered two weeks with lectures and exercises. We had lectures by more than 30 distinguished researchers from all over the world, including developers and managers of seven leading companies in the field of mathematical optimization.

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Workflow

The two weeks were organized as follows:

1. To participate in Q&A and the exercise, participants had to register. If, however, one just wanted watch some of the presentations, one could do so, the videos are publicly available.
2. Each day, a set of pre-recorded lectures was released on our YouTube channel. Participants had one day to watch those. The total length of the videos was typically about two hours per day and we assumed that it will take about three to four hours to watch them. Participants could take advantage of the possibility to watch videos at their own pace, with breaks and repetitions. All videos came with English subtitles.
3. Each day, there were two 30 minute live Q&A sessions on Zoom, where one could ask questions to the lecturers, concerning the videos released on the previous day. The sessions were about 11 hours apart, one was supposed to participate in one of them, whichever fits one's time zone. During the second week, there were some Q&A's at unusual hours, to accommodate our speakers in different time zones.
4. Each day, there were two 90 minute live exercise sessions, with interactive tutoring and hands-on experience with state-of-the-art optimization software. The exercise sessions took place directly after the Q&A. The two exercise sessions for one topic were identical, participants were supposed to participate in one of them, whichever fits one's time zone. One-on-one tutoring took place in parallel breakout rooms.
5. Exercises were held using Jupyter notebooks hosted in a cloud. Participants received a personalized link in a separate e-mail. Alternatively, one could pull the docker image coatwork/dockerimage:latest from dockerhub.
6. One week after the last day of the course, there was a final exam. It was in written form, online (except for students from Berlin) and took about 90 minutes.
7. Next to passing the exam, it was mandatory to actively participate in the exercises and Q&A sessions in order to pass the course.

Schedule

Previous Workshops

CO@Work2020, will be the sixth incarnation of this workshop series, and the fourth one being held in Berlin.

• Berlin 2015
  From September 28 to October 10, 2015 more than 160 students from 29 countries, covering all continents except Antarctica, participated in the course held at Zuse Institute Berlin.
• Berlin 2009
  From September 21 to October 9, 2009 many students from all over the world participated in the course held at the Zuse Institute Berlin.
• Berlin 2005
  From October 4-15 more than 100 students out of 10 countries participated in the course held at the Zuse Institute Berlin.
• Görlitz 2006
  From September 3-15 parts of the course where discussed during the Görlitz summer school of the German National Academic Foundation.
• Beijing 2006 From September 25 to October 6 more than 40 students from all over China attended the course as part of the Workshop Optimization Methods and Applications at the Morningside Center of Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.