Thiago Serra
@thserra.bsky.social
Assistant professor at University of Iowa, formerly at Bucknell University, mathematical optimizer with an #orms PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, curious about scaling up constraint learning, proud father of two
October 29, 2025 at 1:08 AM
In Hans Mittelmann’s presentation on optimization benchmark results at #informs2025, he raised the point that benchmarking enters a new era with AI being used under the hood by solvers in one way or another.
October 28, 2025 at 1:14 PM
In Hans Mittelmann’s presentation on optimization benchmark results at #informs2025, he raised the point that benchmarking enters a new era with AI being used under the hood by solvers in one way or another.
Thinking of my PhD days, my recollection of Shabbir Ahmed was as one of those senior professors who would come, chat, and give advice to other people’s PhD students in workshops and conferences. He was a nice guy who left this world too early.
October 28, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Thinking of my PhD days, my recollection of Shabbir Ahmed was as one of those senior professors who would come, chat, and give advice to other people’s PhD students in workshops and conferences. He was a nice guy who left this world too early.
The University of Iowa is launching a new ranking of business analytics departments (including equivalent departments in other business schools) at this year’s @informs.bsky.social Annual Meeting.
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October 26, 2025 at 4:07 PM
The University of Iowa is launching a new ranking of business analytics departments (including equivalent departments in other business schools) at this year’s @informs.bsky.social Annual Meeting.
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Wrapping up, I caught up with former colleagues and students from Bucknell University who are here for the conference.
#informs2025
#informs2025
October 26, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Wrapping up, I caught up with former colleagues and students from Bucknell University who are here for the conference.
#informs2025
#informs2025
Later, I sat again with Kayse Lee Maass for the panel Research Pathways at the MIF Undergraduate Workshop, hosted by Trilce Encarnacion and Ruben Proano Morales (thank you Austin Saragih for the pic!)
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October 26, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Later, I sat again with Kayse Lee Maass for the panel Research Pathways at the MIF Undergraduate Workshop, hosted by Trilce Encarnacion and Ruben Proano Morales (thank you Austin Saragih for the pic!)
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Had a fun pre-INFORMS Saturday.
First, I joined Kayse Lee Maass and Graeme Warren for the panel Learning and Teaching with Games at the Teaching Excellence and Networking workshop, hosted by Yaren Bilge Kaya.
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First, I joined Kayse Lee Maass and Graeme Warren for the panel Learning and Teaching with Games at the Teaching Excellence and Networking workshop, hosted by Yaren Bilge Kaya.
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October 26, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Had a fun pre-INFORMS Saturday.
First, I joined Kayse Lee Maass and Graeme Warren for the panel Learning and Teaching with Games at the Teaching Excellence and Networking workshop, hosted by Yaren Bilge Kaya.
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First, I joined Kayse Lee Maass and Graeme Warren for the panel Learning and Teaching with Games at the Teaching Excellence and Networking workshop, hosted by Yaren Bilge Kaya.
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Happening right now at INFORMS: Lucas Waddell is talking about our project, which improved how final exams are scheduled at Bucknell University at B406!
You can read more about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.11031
#informs2025
You can read more about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.11031
#informs2025
October 26, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Happening right now at INFORMS: Lucas Waddell is talking about our project, which improved how final exams are scheduled at Bucknell University at B406!
You can read more about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.11031
#informs2025
You can read more about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.11031
#informs2025
If the LLM that you use for preparing your job application is the same LLM used by the recruiter on the other side for identifying top candidates, does that improve your chances?
Jiannan Xu showed us at #informs2025 Data Mining workshop that YES, it does!
Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Jiannan Xu showed us at #informs2025 Data Mining workshop that YES, it does!
Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
October 25, 2025 at 8:39 PM
If the LLM that you use for preparing your job application is the same LLM used by the recruiter on the other side for identifying top candidates, does that improve your chances?
Jiannan Xu showed us at #informs2025 Data Mining workshop that YES, it does!
Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Jiannan Xu showed us at #informs2025 Data Mining workshop that YES, it does!
Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Iowa City folks:
Tomorrow(Friday, October 17) I will be talking at the University of Iowa Computer Science's Colloquium @uiowacs.bsky.social about optimization over trained neural networks.
The talk is at 3:30 PM in room 110 MLH.
For more details: cs.uiowa.edu/event/34670/0
Tomorrow(Friday, October 17) I will be talking at the University of Iowa Computer Science's Colloquium @uiowacs.bsky.social about optimization over trained neural networks.
The talk is at 3:30 PM in room 110 MLH.
For more details: cs.uiowa.edu/event/34670/0
October 16, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Iowa City folks:
Tomorrow(Friday, October 17) I will be talking at the University of Iowa Computer Science's Colloquium @uiowacs.bsky.social about optimization over trained neural networks.
The talk is at 3:30 PM in room 110 MLH.
For more details: cs.uiowa.edu/event/34670/0
Tomorrow(Friday, October 17) I will be talking at the University of Iowa Computer Science's Colloquium @uiowacs.bsky.social about optimization over trained neural networks.
The talk is at 3:30 PM in room 110 MLH.
For more details: cs.uiowa.edu/event/34670/0
@jannisku.bsky.social is giving a very interesting talk on explainable (integer) optimization at the @euroorml.bsky.social seminar, highlighting counterfactual explanations before diving on new work with Coherent Local Explanations for Mathematical Optimization (CLEMO): arxiv.org/abs/2502.04840
October 13, 2025 at 3:31 PM
@jannisku.bsky.social is giving a very interesting talk on explainable (integer) optimization at the @euroorml.bsky.social seminar, highlighting counterfactual explanations before diving on new work with Coherent Local Explanations for Mathematical Optimization (CLEMO): arxiv.org/abs/2502.04840
It was great having Joe Paat visiting The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business on Friday — and having a chance to further understand this work!
October 13, 2025 at 3:26 PM
It was great having Joe Paat visiting The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business on Friday — and having a chance to further understand this work!
Last, but not least, I also managed to see how fast my little niece is growing during my quick hop connecting in Sao Paulo! 😍
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October 6, 2025 at 7:14 PM
Last, but not least, I also managed to see how fast my little niece is growing during my quick hop connecting in Sao Paulo! 😍
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This was a great opportunity for strengthening my ties with the Brazilian AI community and meet many talented colleagues. I am very grateful for the invitation by Rosiane de Freitas-Rodrigues to play such an important role at the conference, and for reconnecting me with my academic origins.
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October 6, 2025 at 7:09 PM
This was a great opportunity for strengthening my ties with the Brazilian AI community and meet many talented colleagues. I am very grateful for the invitation by Rosiane de Freitas-Rodrigues to play such an important role at the conference, and for reconnecting me with my academic origins.
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Last week I had the immense privilege of giving the opening keynote talk of the BRACIS - Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems #bracis2025 and visiting the beautiful city of Fortaleza for the first time.
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October 6, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Last week I had the immense privilege of giving the opening keynote talk of the BRACIS - Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems #bracis2025 and visiting the beautiful city of Fortaleza for the first time.
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Second, she has partnered with SAS Brasil to first train people who will produce a better and more inclusive melanoma dataset. With a sensitization of the human who diagnoses about what types of lesions are malign on different skin tones, she hopes that we will eventually train the right model!
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October 4, 2025 at 8:06 PM
Second, she has partnered with SAS Brasil to first train people who will produce a better and more inclusive melanoma dataset. With a sensitization of the human who diagnoses about what types of lesions are malign on different skin tones, she hopes that we will eventually train the right model!
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The recognition of her work led to new and unexpected references and collaborations. First, the cosmetic industry is considerably ahead in cataloging skin tones, and in fact celebrated her contributions.
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October 4, 2025 at 8:00 PM
The recognition of her work led to new and unexpected references and collaborations. First, the cosmetic industry is considerably ahead in cataloging skin tones, and in fact celebrated her contributions.
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On the other hand, those models missed the mark in lesions at body extremities like the hand palm, foot sole, and under the nails; which have considerably higher incidence in darker-skinned individuals.
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October 4, 2025 at 7:49 PM
On the other hand, those models missed the mark in lesions at body extremities like the hand palm, foot sole, and under the nails; which have considerably higher incidence in darker-skinned individuals.
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By removing the skin lesions entirely from the images in one way or another, her team still obtained models that were still considerably accurate due to other characteristics present in those images.
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October 4, 2025 at 7:42 PM
By removing the skin lesions entirely from the images in one way or another, her team still obtained models that were still considerably accurate due to other characteristics present in those images.
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Closing #bracis2025 with mastery, Sandra Avila talked about her journey working on diagnosing melanomas (a type of skin cancer).
Interestingly, the story starts with winning a classification contest, and then evolves from her working backwards to figure out what the models actually predicted.
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Interestingly, the story starts with winning a classification contest, and then evolves from her working backwards to figure out what the models actually predicted.
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October 4, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Closing #bracis2025 with mastery, Sandra Avila talked about her journey working on diagnosing melanomas (a type of skin cancer).
Interestingly, the story starts with winning a classification contest, and then evolves from her working backwards to figure out what the models actually predicted.
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Interestingly, the story starts with winning a classification contest, and then evolves from her working backwards to figure out what the models actually predicted.
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Although such attacks can be successful without interfering directly with the node being attacked, they lead to high-rank tensors. Hence, low-rank tensor approximations end up being a way to filtering the attacker’s noise from the information encoded in the graph.
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October 1, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Although such attacks can be successful without interfering directly with the node being attacked, they lead to high-rank tensors. Hence, low-rank tensor approximations end up being a way to filtering the attacker’s noise from the information encoded in the graph.
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Towards the end, Papalexakis talked about computationally efficient clustering methods, and how they may be bound to adversarial attacks in graph neural networks.
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October 1, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Towards the end, Papalexakis talked about computationally efficient clustering methods, and how they may be bound to adversarial attacks in graph neural networks.
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Rank-one tensors are blocks obtained as the product of vectors, which approximate part of the information in the tensor.
That allows to investigate networks in a number of ways, such as in one of their studies on citations, coauthorship, and clustering of scholars in different areas.
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That allows to investigate networks in a number of ways, such as in one of their studies on citations, coauthorship, and clustering of scholars in different areas.
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October 1, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Rank-one tensors are blocks obtained as the product of vectors, which approximate part of the information in the tensor.
That allows to investigate networks in a number of ways, such as in one of their studies on citations, coauthorship, and clustering of scholars in different areas.
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That allows to investigate networks in a number of ways, such as in one of their studies on citations, coauthorship, and clustering of scholars in different areas.
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Papalexakis then uses the example of a graph in which multiple edges between the same vertices are possible, which leads to one adjacency matrix for each label and therefore to a “3-dimensional matrix”, or tensor, if we want all of those adjacency matrices as part of a same mathematical object.
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October 1, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Papalexakis then uses the example of a graph in which multiple edges between the same vertices are possible, which leads to one adjacency matrix for each label and therefore to a “3-dimensional matrix”, or tensor, if we want all of those adjacency matrices as part of a same mathematical object.
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Preparing the ground for a future generalization from matrices to tensors, Papalexakis characterized rank-one matrices as those that can be obtained from the product of a column and a row. That entails a perspective of low-rank approximations as a sum of few such column-row products.
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October 1, 2025 at 12:32 PM
Preparing the ground for a future generalization from matrices to tensors, Papalexakis characterized rank-one matrices as those that can be obtained from the product of a column and a row. That entails a perspective of low-rank approximations as a sum of few such column-row products.
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