Michal Kočvara is Professor in Mathematical Optimization at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a senior researcher at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He (co-)authored a monograph and over 50 journal articles on various aspects of mathematical optimization and optimization of mechanical structures. He co-developed several computer programs for nonlinear and semidefinite optimization and optimization of elastic structures. His work has been supported by several EU grants.Bernard Mourrain is research director at Inria of Université Côte d'Azur. He was at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan from 1984 to 1988, got his PhD at the center of Mathematics of École Polytechnique in 1991, his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches at the University of Nice in 1997. His research interests include symbolic and numeric computation, polynomial systems solving, polynomial optimization, effective algebraic geometry, geometric modeling, isogeometric analysis.Cordian Riener is a professor of mathematics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, located in Tromsø, Norway. He studied mathematical economics, mathematics and philosophy at Ulm University, the University Bordeaux 2, and Goethe University Frankfurt. After completing his PhD in mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt, he worked as a postdoc at the University of Konstanz and Aalto University. His interests are focused on mathematical structures in computation, optimization, and computational complexity.
