ORC IAP Seminar 2026 Talk 2 Connor Lawless
Connor Lawless
Postdoctoral Fellow
Stanford University
Title
Accessible Optimization through Generative AI
Abstract
From healthcare delivery to resilient power grid management, optimization has the potential to improve decision-making for some of today’s most pressing problems, but its use is often limited by the mathematical expertise required to model and solve complex problems. This talk will showcase the potential of generative AI to lower this barrier and democratize access to advanced optimization tools. Motivated by a collaboration with Microsoft Outlook, the first part of the talk will present a novel framework for interactive decision support for non-expert users that leverages large language models (LLM) to translate user requests into an underlying constraint programming model. We investigate this framework through the lens of meeting scheduling, and showcase its potential via a user study with a prototype system. In the second part of the talk, we demonstrate how LLMs can be used to automatically generate problem-specific optimization solver configurations, a challenging task for even expert optimization users. Our approach achieves up to 70% speed-ups over default solver settings with little-to-no additional compute. We will conclude by discussing broader opportunities for integrating AI and optimization, moving toward a future where powerful decision-making tools are as accessible for managers at a local food bank as they are for applied scientists at Amazon.
Bio
Connor Lawless is an HAI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human- Centered Artificial Intelligence advised by Ellen Vitercik and Madeleine Udell. His research blends tools from optimization, machine learning, and human-computer interaction to make advanced analytics tools more accessible and trustworthy. He received his PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University where he was advised by Oktay Gunluk, and previously spent time at Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
https://orc.mit.edu/calendar_event/or...