Combinatorial Optimization context, opens very interesting scenarios because DO is the "home" of an endless list of decision-making problems that are of fundamental importance in multitude applications. The workshop will bring together experts in mathematics (optimization, graph theory, sparsity, combinatorics, statistics), operations research (assignment problems, routing, planning, Bayesian search, automation, scheduling), machine learning (deep learning, supervised, self-supervised and reinforcement learning) and artificial intelligence at large (including multi-agent systems, interpretability, fairness, etc.).

This white paper was prepared by the participants of the fall 2016 long program Understanding Many-Particle Systems with Machine Learning. Interactions between many constituent particles, i.e. quarks, electrons, atoms, molecules, or materials, generally give rise to collective or emergent phenomena in matter. Even when the interactions between the particles are well defined and the governing equations of the system are understood, the collective behavior of the system as a whole does not trivially emerge from these equations. Despite many decades of prominent work on interacting many-particle (MP) systems, the problem of N interacting particles is not exactly soluble. In fact, computational complexity typically increases exponentially with N.