On May 5, we opened the AdONE Seminar Series for summer 2025 with a guest talk by Prof. Kevin Tierney (Bielefeld University), invited by Prof. Maximilian Schiffer. His presentation, “Deep Reinforcement Learning for Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems”, highlighted how learning-based methods can automate heuristic design and outperform traditional techniques in domains like vehicle routing.

Prof. Tierney is a leading researcher at the intersection of machine learning and operations research. His work has earned international recognition, including awards from the MaxSAT Evaluation (2016) and the IJCAI AI for TSP competition (2021).

We thank Prof. Tierney for an inspiring start to this semester’s seminar series!