This year, the Latin American Summer Workshop on Operations Research took place in Lima, Peru, from 3rd to 8th of February. As one of the European delegates I had the pleasure to participate in this workshop and become acquainted with the state of the art of Latin American universities in the field of operations research. My presentation was on "Spare Parts End of Life Inventory Problem" which is part of my PhD research in Erasmus University Rotterdam.
The workshop was organized to be held in country club El Bosque in Chosica, 30 km away from Lima. That beautiful club in suburb area of Lima with a spectacular scene surrounded by mountains and containing recreation and sport complex was really well chosen as conference venue, and all of the participants were delighted by that environment. The workshop commenced 9:00 each morning and lasted till 18:00. Almost half of this time was assigned to student presentations and the rest to tutorials by university professors.
The main stream of the workshop was on Meta-heuristic optimization approaches which is one of my interests and there were lots of student talks and tutorials on those issues. Among those tutorials I found a number of them insightful such as the tutorial by Andres Medaglia from Universidad de los Andes Colombia on "Multi-objective optimization approaches" and three tutorials by Hé Cancela from Universidad de la República, Uruguay on "Video quality assurance on multi-source streaming techniques", "Network reliability models" and "Modeling performance tradeoffs in content networks"
In addition to scientific aspects it was also beneficial for me from an academic networking point of view. It brought about the chance to talk about some research questions by Latin American and Canadian students to cultivate some ideas for future research of mine.
In my view the only drawback of the workshop was having some presentations in Portuguese and Spanish. In other words the participants completely feel free to present in Spanish, Portuguese or English while a remarkable portion of audience could not follow the presentation due to its language. Fortunately the workshop policy, as I talked with the organizers, is to inspire participants to present in English.
Considering all the aspects, I found the workshop really useful and insightful. I have to thank EURO for financial support and ELAVIO committee especially chair woman Rosa Delgadillo for organizing that event.
Morteza Pourakbar
PhD Candidate in Management Sciences
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands