Report on EU/MEeting 2019 – Oslo, Norway

The 20th annual workshop on metaheuristics was hosted by the Optimization Group at SINTEF in Oslo (www.sintef.no) on May 15th and 16th, 2019.

There were 20 participants in total, resulting in a wide variety of interesting talks. Over two days, we had 11 contributed and 2 invited keynote presentations with varied topics, ranging from parameter tuning for metaheuristics to deep infeasibility exploration for vehicle routing problems. Prof. Rafael Martí was invited as a keynote speaker. He shared his enthusiasm for graph drawing by presenting an excellent overview of different graph-drawing models, heuristics methods and open challenges. The second keynote presentation was given by Dr. Franz Fuchs, who introduced us to Quantum computing and its relationship to optimization. Such presentation gave lots of food for thought and discussion. The full program, along with the abstracts of each presentation, can be found on the workshop’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/eume2019/program.

Besides the successful academic event, on Thursday afternoon, we had a walk through sunny Oslo with a bit longer cultural stop at the Vigeland park. It is the largest sculpture park in the world created by a single sculptor with 212 bronze and granite sculptures. The Angry Boy sculpture was one of the highlights of the walking tour. After all that walking, we increased our energy level with a very enjoyable dinner where scientific and other types of discussions continued.

It was also an exciting time to be in Oslo for another reason. All Norwegians put on their traditional “bunad” clothing and celebrate their National Day the day after the workshop. Norwegians are rightly so very proud of this day and try to include everyone in their joy. Some of the participants stayed the extra day to enjoy this happening.
The workshop would not have been possible without the support of the EU/ME working group, the Norwegian Operations Research Society, the Norwegian Research Council and SINTEF.