Origins of NP and P (Distinguished Lecture)
Jack Edmonds,
–
Abstract:
NP and P have origins in “the marriage theorem”:
A matchmaker has as clients the parents of some boys and some girls where some boy-girl pairs love each other.
The matchmaker must find a marriage of all the girls to distinct boys they love or else prove to the parents that it is not possible. The input to this marriage problem is usually imagined as a bipartite graph G with boy nodes, girl nodes, and edges between them representing love.
A possible legal marriage of some of the girls to some of the boys is represented by a subset M of the edges of G, called a matching.
The matchmaker’s problem is to find a matching which hits all the girl nodes Or else prove to the parents that there is none…
Full announcement at https://thor.inesc-id.pt/jack.edmonds/
Bio
Jack Edmonds is one of the creators of combinatorial optimization. He attended George Washington University before pursuing graduate study at the University of Maryland. He received his master’s degree in 1959 and began work at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). He moved to the University of Waterloo in 1969, where he supervised a dozen PhD students. Throughout his career, he has influenced and assisted numerous young researchers. In the 1960s, Jack Edmonds developed a theory of matroid partition and intersection that still stands as one of the most profound and thorough explorations in the field. He illustrated the deep interconnections between combinatorial minmax theorems, polyhedral structure, duality theory, and efficient algorithms. He published many influential papers on these topics, with the one published in 1972 on theoretical improvements in algorithmic efficiency for network flow problems with Richard Karp leading to one of the most well known algorithms among nowadays CS students. He was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his contributions as a researcher and educator in 1985. Jack Edmonds retired from teaching in 1999 and was elected into the inaugural Fellows class of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
Host
Alexandre Paulo Lourenço Francisco
Venue:
FA3 – Informatic Department – IST Alameda
Upcoming Events
INESC Brussels HUB Winter Meeting 2023

This edition of the HUB Winter Meeting will be co-organised with Science Business and will take place on the 30 and 31 January, in Lisbon, at Instituto Superior Técnico, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Please see below a summary of the agenda, this will be updated on the INESC Brussels HUB website regularly (confirmed speakers and other relevant info). Places for onsite participation are limited so registration is mandatory. Online participants will be sent a ZOOM link for each specific session on the 27th January.
INESC Brussels HUB website: https://hub.inesc.pt/
Monday, 30 January
a) Digital Europe Programme & Chips Act: state of play and possibilities for INESC.
9h to 10h30 GMT
(Exclusive for INESC researchers and administrators).
b) Science Business: how can INESC tap into Science Business network, activities and communications tools.
(Exclusive for INESC researchers and administrators).
c) Networking Lunch (for all onsite participants).
d) Roundtable: From rhetoric to reality – Embedding international strategy in the DNA of research organisations.
(Closed-door, roundtable workshop, Chatham House rules, open to INESC researchers and administrators, external participants by invitation only).
e) Networking Dinner
(By invitation only – INESC researchers participating onsite in the event are elegible to join).
Tuesday, 31 January
f) Workshop: How they did it? Strategic positioning for structural success in Horizon Europe: a discussion of best practices.
(Exclusive for INESC researchers, administrators and international invited speakers).
g) The public consultation on European R&I Programmes: Towards FP10.
(Closed-door, roundtable workshop, Chatham House rules, open to INESC researchers and administrators, external participants by invitation only).
h) Networking Lunch (for all onsite participants).
i) Management Committee meeting (Directors and POB members)
The HUB Winter Meeting aims at bringing together researchers and administrators from the 5 INESC institutes, affiliated higher education institutions in Portugal and abroad, with key European and global players, to:
– Discuss key research and innovation issues at EU level.
– Inform institutional policy and strategy.
– Exchange best-practices about R&I management, career development and policy positioning.
– Promote, discuss and deliver vision, visibility, networking and impactful communication.
– Create, identify and deepen partnerships and collaboration opportunities for collaborative R&I.