AI4OPT Newsletter | October 2026

This October, we celebrate five years of AI4OPT!

To put five years in perspective, think for a moment about the world in which AI4OPT began. ChatGPT was still a year away, and the idea of fusing AI and optimization was only beginning to gain traction. At the same time, AI4OPT's education efforts were just getting started. Our education program included a small high school camp at Georgia Tech that we had to move online because of the pandemic. Five years later, the opportunities at the intersection of AI and optimization are widely recognized. AI4OPT has demonstrated its impact across power systems, supply chains and manufacturing, while that first camp has grown into five different camps reaching hundreds of students every year, with plans to grow even bigger. Our Institute now collaborates with more than 50 organizations, including companies, universities, high schools, and nonprofits. It is truly remarkable to look back at how far we have come.

I am incredibly grateful to the National Science Foundation for recognizing this progress and renewing AI4OPT for another five years. We are entering this next phase with a strong foundation, but the next five years cannot simply be more of the same. The world continues to evolve, and the systems we depend on are becoming larger, more interconnected, and increasingly complex. Power grids, supply chains, and advanced manufacturing are all systems that must operate reliably under uncertainty and adapt to changing conditions. AI4OPT will tackle these challenges through new directions such as control-aware optimization, contextual optimization, and foundation models for AI-guided optimization.

Ultimately, none of this would be possible without our community. I want to thank our faculty, staff, students, alumni, collaborators, teachers, and everyone else who has helped build AI4OPT over our first five years. Rosemary Barrass, spotlighted in this issue, captures this journey beautifully. She appeared in our inaugural newsletter as a first-year Ph.D. student, and now she is translating cutting-edge research into real-world impact while preparing for the next stage of her career. Seeing researchers like Rosemary grow is one of the things that makes me proudest of AI4OPT. As we begin our next five years, I cannot wait to see where our community takes us next.

Meet Rosemary Barrass, a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech whose research focuses on power systems optimization and quantum computing. During her time with AI4OPT, she has collaborated with Southern Company and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), presented her research at leading operations research and energy conferences, earned two Best Poster Awards, and was a finalist in Georgia Tech's 2026 Three-Minute Thesis competition.

When AI4OPT first featured Barrass in its inaugural newsletter, she was a first-year Ph.D. student navigating a major transition to graduate school. Five years later, she established herself as a researcher working to develop methods that break large optimization problems into smaller pieces that can be solved by both quantum and classical computers. Her work aims to make advanced computing tools more practical for solving real-world challenges in energy systems.

"Through AI4OPT, I have had an incredible number of opportunities that I would never have imagined I could have," Barrass said. "I spent three years working closely with Southern Company and the last two and a half years collaborating with LANL—experiences that helped shape both my research and my career.”

During these collaborations, Barrass worked closely with LANL researchers Harsha Nagarajan, Russell Bent, and Carleton Coffrin, whose mentorship helped her develop the expertise and confidence that have guided her Ph.D. journey. Looking ahead, she is exploring opportunities to continue her career at LANL as a postdoctoral researcher, where she hopes to advance decomposition algorithms and demonstrate how quantum computing, classical computing, and machine learning can work together to solve complex challenges in energy, supply chains, and beyond.

As AI4OPT enters its next five years, researchers like Barrass demonstrate the lasting impact of the Institute's investments in students, partnerships, and innovation.

NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT
One accomplishment Barrass is especially proud of is developing a fast generator scheduling tool now being tested for deployment in Southern Company's planning pipeline. The project gave her the opportunity to help translate academic research into a practical solution for industry, providing firsthand experience in moving innovative optimization methods from the lab to real-world applications.

Meet Nagi Gebraeel, the Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he leads the Predictive Analytics and Intelligent Systems (PAIS) research group. His research combines machine learning, causal inference, and optimization to help organizations detect emerging issues, anticipate failures, and make smarter decisions about maintenance and operations.

Through AI4OPT, Gebraeel has helped connect AI, optimization, and data science with real-world infrastructure challenges. One example is the NSF ExpandAI ARISE initiative, a collaboration between Georgia Tech and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) focused on advancing research in infrastructure monitoring, robotics, sensing, and predictive analytics.

"ARISE was an opportunity for me to connect my research in data science for reliability applications with important problems in infrastructure monitoring, while also building a sustained research partnership between UTRGV and Georgia Tech," Gebraeel said.

Through the program, students and researchers gain experience across the full research pipeline, from collecting data from physical systems to developing AI models and applying those insights to real-world decisions.

Looking ahead, Gebraeel sees infrastructure monitoring as an important area for AI4OPT's next phase of growth, bringing AI and optimization closer to real-time decision-making in complex physical systems. He believes initiatives like ARISE can help accelerate innovation while preparing future researchers to address increasingly complex challenges in infrastructure and intelligent systems.

As research challenges become increasingly interconnected, Gebraeel is focused on creating environments where students, faculty, and industry partners can learn from one another and develop solutions together. For him, programs like ARISE are as much about building people as they are about advancing technology.

A LASTING PARTNERSHIP
Among the accomplishments Gebraeel values most is seeing the research capabilities developed through the partnership with UTRGV. During the 2025 ARISE meeting, he was particularly impressed by the advanced reliability and testing facilities built by UTRGV students, a testament to the hands-on technical experience and research culture the collaboration fostered.

AI4OPT has secured a $20 million NSF renewal through 2031, marking a major milestone for the Institute and supporting the next phase of research, innovation, and collaboration. The renewed investment will advance groundbreaking work in AI and optimization while expanding educational programs that prepare students, educators, and future leaders for an increasingly AI-driven world.

This fall and winter, AI4OPT researchers and leaders will be featured at major conferences across the country. At SAIL 2026, Pascal Van Hentenryck will serve as a panelist while AI4OPT researchers share their work and connect with attendees. At the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting, Alper Atamtürk will serrve as a general co-chair, with AI4OPT students presenting research and representing the Institute. AI4OPT members will also participate in various NeurIPS 2026 workshops and sessions in Atlanta.