Today, the AI4OPT Institute hosted a meeting with its External Advisory Board (EAB) at its headquarters located in Georgia Tech. The purpose of the meeting was to provide an opportunity for the EAB to be updated on the latest developments and ongoing projects by members of the Institute in various areas of research methodology. This meeting features many our leaders, researchers and students, including Bistra Dilkina, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and USC Site Director for AI4OPT, who presented virtually on the Optimization Solvers methodology thrust and its goals and projects.

Swati Gupta, Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, and leader of AI4OPT's Ethical AI methodology thrust, discussed the team's three broader projects: theoretical foundations, stakeholder IEEE metrics, and ethical societal systems.

Wenbo Chen, a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech and AI4OPT graduate research assistant, highlighted the challenges and applications of real-time risk assessments, including empirical risk minimization under constraints, reliability, and scalability in the End to End Optimization methodology thrust.

Additionally, methodology thrust leads for Decision Making under Uncertainty (George Lan), Reinforcement Learning (Justin Romberg), Distributed and Multi-agent Learning and Optimization (Pieter Abbeel), and Combinatorial Learning (Alper Atamturk) also presented their progress updates.

The EAB also received insight from our end-use cases of Energy Systems (Mathieu Tanneau), Resilience and Sustainability (Yongsheng Chen), and Hardware Design and Control (Bora Nikolic), as well as the education and workforce development program led by Kevin Dalmeijer, AI4OPT's managing director.

The Institute is appreciative of the EAB's dedicated service and looks forward to continuing the dialogue. The EAB's mission is to provide advice and assistance in shaping and supporting the strategic goals and objectives of AI4OPT.