June 2026:

  1. Several paper preprints are out
  2. Three conference proceedings were accepted for publication at WSC 2026
    • LISA: Large Language Models Can Invent Solvers Autonomously
    • Diagnostic Tools for Stochastically Constrained Optimization: A Case Study
    • Stochastic Trust Region Methods for Derivative-free Optimization with Equality Constraints
  3. Group had presentations in several conferences in the month of June:
    • Shashaani and Amici presented at SIAM Conference on Optimization in Edinburgh, UK
    • Amici presented at The 5th Italian Meeting on Probability and Mathematical Statistics in Palermo, Italy
    • Shashaani gave a seminar the Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of Vienna, Austria
    • Shashaani gave a plenary talk at the 11th VOCAL Optimization Conference: Advanced Algorithms, Széchenyi István University in Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary
  4. Shashaani receives two new fundings as a Co-PI
    • UNC System Research Opportunities Initiative, Personalized Federated Learning Framework for Advanced Manufacturing Environment, 2026-2029
    • National Science Foundation CMMI-2624250, 2026 I-Sim Workshop – Simulation in the Age of Digital Twins and AI, 2026

Apr 26: Shashaani received the Meritorious Reviewer Award from INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC).

IJOC publishes a list of all Meritorious Reviewers each year in the journal.

Mar 26: Our group had two invited presentations at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference in Atlanta, GA:

  1. Stratified Adaptive Sampling for Derivative-free Trust Region Optimization: Complexity and Applications; presented by Amici
  2. Stochastic Trust Region Optimization with Quadratic Regularization; presented by Shashaani

Dec 25: Shashaani’s collaboration with SAS Viya and NC State’s Ag Analytics Platform with co-PI Sharara recognized in a new piece from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. This project aims as using AI to build uncertainty-aware predictions of consequences for different farming management strategies which can help farmers make more robust decisions facing the climate change.

Dec 25: Our paper “Dynamic Calibration of Digital Twins via Stochastic Simulation: A Wind Energy Case Study” won two awards at the Winter Simulation Conference:

i) Best Contributed Applied Paper (Among 219 accepted contributed papers at WSC)

ii) ACM SIGSIM Best Student Paper Award at the PhD Colloquium

Read more on the ISE News website.

Sep 25: Paper “Diagnostic Tools for Evaluating Solvers for Stochastically Constrained Simulation Optimization Problems” by Felice and Shashaani and co-authors Eckman and Henderson is submitted.

Aug 25: Jeon successfully completed his internship at Simio (a commercial discrete-event simulation software). At his internship he translated the ASTRO-DF algorithm in that software package.

July 25: Shashaani presented recent work in Derivative-free Stochastic Optimization with Trust Regions at 1) EUROPT 2025 (22nd Conference on Advances in Continuous Optimization), Southampton, UK; 2) ICCOPT 2025 (International Conference on Continuous Optimization), Los Angeles, CA; and 3) SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada.

July 25: Shashaani serves as a panelist at the summer school of EUROPT 2025 (22nd Conference on Advances in Continuous Optimization), Southampton, UK

June 25: Shashaani presents at the Derivative-free optimization invited session of Portuguese American Optimization Workshop along with Katya Scheinberg and Stefan Wild organized by Luis Vicente at the beautiful Horta island of Azores, Portugal.

June 25: Ha receives the second place in the 2025 IISE Pritsker’s Doctoral Dissertation Award in Atlanta. Congrats Yunsoo!

May 25: Westlund, Newman, Billings, and Lloyd who were advised by Shashaani win the second place at ISE-NCSU for their senior design project for Waste Management with Simulation Optimization at Hitachi Energy.

Apr 25: Jeon among the recipients of 2025 ISE Shook Mentor Award. Congrats Yongseok!

Mar 25: Ha receives the prestigious IISE Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2nd Place for his dissertation “Accelerating Stochastic Derivative Free Optimization“! Congratulations Yunsoo!