Description

Leader of the group Networks and Optimization: Guido Schäfer.

In today’s society, complex systems surround us. From transport and traffic, to behavioral economics and operations management, real-world applications often demand that we identify simple, optimal solutions among a huge set of possibilities. Our research group Networks and Optimization (N&O) does fundamental research to tackle such challenging optimization problems. 

We develop algorithmic methods to solve complex optimization problems efficiently. Our research provides efficient algorithms to some of the most challenging problems, for example, in planning, scheduling and routing. To come up with the best optimization algorithms, we combine and extend techniques from different disciplines in mathematics and computer science. 

N&O covers a broad spectrum of optimization aspects. Our expertise ranges from discrete to continuous optimization and applies to centralized and decentralized settings. We focus on both problem-specific methods and universal toolkits to solve different types of optimization problems. The key in our investigations is to understand and exploit combinatorial structures, such as graphs, networks, lattices and matroids. Our research is of high scientific impact and contributes to various fields.

In several cooperations with industry partners, the algorithmic techniques that we develop in our group have proven useful to solve complex real-world problems. We are always interested in new algorithmic challenges arising in real-world applications and are open to new cooperations.

 

Watch our group video to get a glimpse of our activities.

 

Video about our collaboration with ProRail (in Dutch)

 

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Vacancies

News

Jie Li and Sophie Huiberts selected to participate in the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum

Jie Li and Sophie Huiberts selected to participate in the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum

Jie Li from the DIS group and Sophie Huiberts from the N&O group have been selected to participate in the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). The annual HLF event selects a small group of 200 most qualified Young Researchers worldwide to meet pre-eminent scientists from the fields of mathematics and computer science.

Jie Li and Sophie Huiberts selected to participate in the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum - Read More…

Current events

N&O seminar: Raghu Meka (UCLA)

  • 2020-02-26T11:00:00+01:00
  • 2020-02-26T12:00:00+01:00
February 26 Wednesday

Start: 2020-02-26 11:00:00+01:00 End: 2020-02-26 12:00:00+01:00

CWI, Room L016 (Science Park 123 - Amsterdam)

Everyone is welcome to attend the N&O seminar of Raghu Meka (UCLA) with the title ' Secret Sharing Resilient against Leakage and Tampering' .

Abstract:

Secret sharing is one of the most classical and widely used cryptographic primitives. In the most basic and perhaps the most important setup, a secret needs to be shared between n parties such at that any t of them can recover the secret but no fewer can gain any information even with collusion. As useful as this model, such schemes are still susceptible to attacks where someone 'leaks' tiny amount of information from the parties. Here we seek to counteract such threats.

We say that a secret sharing scheme is p-party leakage-resilient, if the secret remains statistically hidden even after an adversary learns a bounded amount of leakage, where each bit of leakage can depend jointly on the shares of an adaptively chosen subset of p parties. We give an unconditional compiler that transforms any standard secret sharing scheme into a p-party leakage-resilient one for p logarithmic in the number of parties. This yields the first secret sharing schemes secure against adaptive and joint leakage for more than two parties. Our constructions rely on a clean connection we draw to communication complexity in the well-studied number-on-forehead (NOF) model.

Based on joint work with Ashutosh Kumar (UCLA) and Amit Sahai (UCLA).

7th SDP Days - a workshop on Applications of Semidefinite Optimization

  • 2020-05-06T00:00:00+02:00
  • 2020-05-07T23:59:59+02:00
May 6 Wednesday

Start: 2020-05-06 00:00:00+02:00 End: 2020-05-07 23:59:59+02:00

Lecture room CWI, Science Park 123, Amsterdam

Everyone is welcome to attend the SDP Days; a workshop on Applications of Semidefinite Optimization. All information (speakers and abstracts) can be found on the website. Participation is free, but please register by sending an email to Susanne van Dam (susanne@cwi.nl) before 25 April so that we can organize the catering.

 

 

Members

Associated Members

Publications

Current projects with external funding

  • Continuous Methods in Discrete Optimization ()
  • Wiskundecluster DIAMANT ()
  • Smart Heuristic Problem Optimization
  • Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Optimisation Applications (MINOA)
  • Polynomial Optimization, Efficiency through Moments and Algebra (POEMA)
  • Vóórkomen en voorkómen van incidenten op het spoor (PPS Prorail)
  • Towards a Quantitative Theory of Integer Programming (QIP)

Related partners

  • Alma Mater Studiorum-Universita di Bologna
  • Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
  • CNR Pisa
  • CNRS
  • Dassault Systèmes B.V.
  • IBM
  • INRIA
  • Prorail
  • Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelmus Universitaet Bonn
  • Technische Universität Dortmund
  • Tilburg University
  • Tromsø, Norway
  • Universita degli Studi di Firenze
  • Universität Konstanz
  • University of Birmingham