Optimization (Linear & Mixed Integer Programming) for Pythonistas, with John Curry

Most Pythonistas these days are fairly aware of what Machine Learning can do for them. Even if you don’t use it in the day-job, you are likely to have at least read the blogs and maybe tried your hand at a Kaggle challenge or a CNN to recognize your cat. We frequently use ML in our AI practise at Last Mile, but we find that many business problems we encounter don’t fit that mould. A fair number of these are best represented as combinatorial optimizations. In the last few years, the Python community has developed software like PYOMO and Google/OR that allow you to set up these problems and solve them in a really intuitive, Pythonic way. There’ll be a bit of maths but not a lot. Mainly, the talk will be about how to model a problem as an optimization, design a Python program, develop it and get to an optimal solution.