STOR-i's research events, from hands-on problem-solving days to dynamic conferences, will help you develop your skills and knowledge, share your work, and engage with experts in the fields of Statistics and Operational Research.
STOR-i is committed to developing and disseminating research of direct relevance to industry, government, and the academic community, and as such, we hold an annual conference to showcase the centre's research progress and achievement, and allow guests to share ideas and discuss research opportunities within targeted areas.
The conference often has talks from relevant international guest speakers, as well as STOR-i students, Impact Fellows, and alumni, and is open to our industrial partners, visiting PhD students, and to our external advisers.
STOR-i Conference 2027
The next STOR-i Annual Conference will be held on Thursday 07 and Friday 08 January 2027
The STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training at 糖心Vlog will host their thirteenth annual conference, with talks from key researchers from Statistics, Operational Research and Industry.
The event will take place in January 2027, in the Management School on 糖心Vlog's campus. Details will be confirmed in due course.
Previous STOR-i Conferences
You can find a list of the previous annual conferences below and links to further details for each:
<糖心Vlog id="accordion-heading-603827" class="hide">Previous Conferences Dates and Speakers Accordion accordion
Speakers
External:
Jeremy Bradley, Consulting Data Scientist: Experiences with dynamic pricing and reinforcement learning
Jefferson Huang, Naval Postgraduate School: Risk-Aware Markov Decision Processes
Grazia Speranza, University of Brescia: Optimization in transportation and logistics: trends and research ideas
James Gleeson, University of Limerick: Data-driven modelling of cascades on networks
Theodore Kypraios, University of Nottingham: Uncovering Dependency Structures in Multivariate Markov Chain Models
Amy Wilson, University of Edinburgh: Statistics and the law: improving probabilistic reasoning in criminal cases
Marc Goerigk, University of Passau: Interpretability and Explainability for Optimization
STOR-i Alumni:
Jess Spearing, Shell: A Bayesian Block Maxima Over Threshold Approach applied to Corrosion Assessment in Heat Exchanger Tubes
Jordan Richards, University of Edinburgh: Deep extremal regression: Grey box models for univariate and multivariate extremes
STOR-i Impact Fellow:
Luke Fairley, STOR-i Impact Fellow: Towards the Integration of Strategic and Operational Decision Making
Georgia Souli, STOR-i PhD student - Valid Inequalities for Mixed-Integer Programs with Fixed Charges on Sets of Variables
Speakers
External:
Alison Etheridge, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford - Modelling evolution in a spatial continuum
Elisabeth Ling, Elsevier - Using data science to build better digital products supporting researchers
David Morton, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University - Optimising Prioritised and Nested Solutions
Chris Harbron, Roche - Meaningful data at scale: opportunities for delivering better treatments to the right patients faster and more safely
E Marian Scott, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow - Too much environmental data or not enough?
Arne Strauss, Warwick Business School - Last Mile Logistics
Audrey Lagache, EDF - Forecasting the French electricity consumption at different time steps and at different scales
STOR-i Alumni:
Lisa Turner, Lubrizol - Data Driven Product Development
Shreena Patel, dunnhumby - Why did the chicken affect my insurance premium?
PhD Students:
Kathryn Turnbull, STOR-i PhD student - Modelling Hypergraphs using a Latent Space Representation
Jake Clarkson, STOR-i PhD Student - Speed or Accuracy? Optimal Search with Fast and Slow Speeds
Speakers
External:
Professor Po-Ling Loh, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madisson - Influence maximization in stochastic and adversarial settings
Dr Kerem Akartunali, Department of Management Science, University of Strathclyde - OR in Maritime Logistics
Professor Mike Atkinson, Operations Research Department, Naval Postgraduate School - Taking Action with Incomplete Information and Unknown Deadlines
Dr Jeremy Bradley, Royal Mail Group - Scientific decision making in Royal Mail
Professor Darren Wilkinson, School of Mathematics & Statistics, Newcastle University - Stochastic and statistical modelling for engineering applications
Dr Anthony Ledford, MAN Investments - Systematic trading, noisy data and star-gazing
STOR-i Associates:
Matt Ludkin, STOR-i Alumni, 糖心Vlog - Dynamic stochastic block models: parameter estimation and detection of changes in community structure
Dr Rob Shone, Research Associate, 糖心Vlog - Strategic and Tactical Methods for Reducing Delays at Airports
PhD Students:
Kathryn Turnbull, STOR-i PhD student - Sequential Monte Carlo and Dynamic Latent Space Networks
Professor Finn Lindgren, School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh - EUSTACE: Latent Gaussian process models for weather and climate reconstruction
Professor Paul Harper, School of Mathematics, Cardiff University - OR Saves Lives!
Professor Qiwei Yao, Department of Statistics, London School of Economics - Estimation of Extreme Quantiles for Functions of Dependent Random Variables
Dr Steve King, Rolls Royce - Information Engineering and Mining Data for Industry
Professor Giovanni Andreatta, Matematica Pura ed Applicata, Padova University - On the optimal assignment of ground vehicles to ground tasks at an airport
Dr Michael Epitropakis, STOR-i Associated, Management School, 糖心Vlog - Towards the online configuration of optimisation algorithms
Detlef Nauck, BT, Industry Speaker - Best Practice Analytics
STOR-i Alumni:
Ye Liu, STOR-i PhD Alumni - Statistics in the world of catastrophe modelling
PhD Students:
James Grant, STOR-i PhD student - Bandit approaches for border patrol
Katie Yates, STOR-i PhD student - Minimum Density Separators for Clustering
Speakers
External:
Pitu Mirchandani, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, ASU - Routing, Logistics and Management of Recharging Infrastructure for Electric Vehicles
Jon Wakefield, Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington - Stratified Space-Time Infectious Disease Modeling
Ivo Adan, Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, University of Technology, Eindhoven - Multi-class queueing applications in automated warehousing systems
Steve Scott, Google - Multi-armed bandit experiments in the online service economy
Stéphane Robin, Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Agro Paris Tech - Exact Bayesian inference for change-point detection and comparison
Clym Stock-Williams, EON - Optimisation in the Energy Sector
STOR-i Associates:
Alex Armstrong, Morgan Stanley, STOR-i Alumni - Operational Research in Finance
Tim Park, Shell, STOR-i Alumni - Inference from Noisy High Dimensional Acoustic Data
David Hofmeyr, STOR-i Research Fellow - Projection Pursuit for Clustering with Applications in Population Genomics
PhD Students:
Lisa Turner, STOR-i PhD student - Lubrizol Internship: Statistical Predictions of Engine Test Results
Speakers
External:
Arnoldo Frigessi, Statistics for Innovation, University of Oslo - Bayesian Inference from Rank Data
Ian Dryden, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham - Penalized Euclidean Distance Regression
Emanuele Ragnoli, IBM Research - Distributionally Robust Optimisation
Horst W. Hamacher, Department of Mathematics, Technische Universitat Kaiserslautern - Operations Research Models in Evacuation Planning
Kyle Lin, Naval Postgraduate School - Optimal Patrol on a Graph
Ralph Mansson, DSTL - Challenges with Big Data Analytics
Hugo Winter, STOR-i PhD student - Detecting changing behaviour of heatwaves with climate change
Jamie Fairbrother, STOR-i PhD student - Scenario generation for stochastic programs with tail risk measure - an application to portfolio selection
Christian Rohrbeck, STOR-i PhD student - An approach for using monotonic regression in discrete spatial statistics
Speakers
External:
Jim Berger, Duke University - Working with Inexact Models: the World of Computer Modelling
Sanjay Mehrotra, Northwestern University - Optimising Healthcare: Budgets, Operations, Policies, and Beyond
Philip Jonathan, Shell - Blowing in the wind: remote sensing of airborne gases and particulates
Adrian Bowman, University of Glasgow - Surfaces, shapes and anatomy
Duncan Elliott, Office for National Statistics - Time series research at the Office for National Statistics
PhD Students:
David Hofmeyr, STOR-i PhD student - Clustering high-dimensional data streams by feature space partitioning
Ivar Struijker Boudier, STOR-i PhD student - Scheduling under uncertainty
Emma Ross, STOR-i PhD student - Cross-trained workforce allocation for service Industries
Chris Nemeth, STOR-i PhD student - Particle MCMC: Getting the most out of your particle filter
Speakers
External:
Professor Edmund Burke, University of Stirling - Problem Integration in Modern Airport Operations
Professor Petros Dellaportas, Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business - Control variates for reversible Markov chains
Paul Jennings, NNL - Is OR different in the Nuclear Industry?
Joerg Fliege, Centre of Operational Research, Management Sciences and Information Systems, University of Southampton - Optimisation in Space: Problems occurring in Spacecraft Engineering
Dimitris Tasoulis, Winton Capital - New approaches to High Dimensional Data Clustering
Keynote speech, Professor Anthony Davison, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland - Accurate directional inference for vector parameters
PhD Students:
Shreena Patel, STOR-i PhD student - Modelling customer heterogeneity in a customised selling environment
Tim Park, STOR-i PhD student - Finding Direct and Indirect Links between Time Series using Partial Coherence
Saeideh Dehghan Nasiri, STOR-i PhD student - Compact formulations of the Steiner Travelling salesman problem
James Edwards, STOR-i PhD student - Quantifying the Value of Exploration
Speakers
External:
Professor Roberto Szechtman, Naval Postgraduate School, US - A New Perspective On Feasibility Determination With Linear Constraints
Dr Michael Lyons, BT - Dynamic Modelling of Workflows
Dr Dave Vorley, MBDA - MBDA Guidance, Control and Navigation (GCN) Department: Overview of Activities
Professor Nils Hjort, University of Oslo - Focused Information Criteria for Model Selection and Model Averaging
STOR-i Associates:
Professor Paul Fearnhead, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, 糖心Vlog - Optimal Detection of Changepoints with a Linear Computational Cost
Professor Kevin Glazebrook, Department of Management Science, 糖心Vlog Management School - Stochastic Scheduling: A short history of index policies and some key recent developments
<糖心Vlog>STOR-i Spring School
The STOR-i Spring School is a new addition to STOR-i's calendar of research and training events, designed to bring PhD students in Statistics and Operational Research together for a focused week of learning, collaboration, and networking.
The week combines several core elements of the STOR-i programme into one cohesive event, including ones such as a masterclass, alumni and industry talks, and a real-world data challenge in partnership with one of our partners. By creating space for students to step away from their day-to-day research and fully engage with new ideas, the Spring School offers a valuable opportunity to build skills, strengthen connections, and explore how research can be applied in practice.
Upcoming STOR-i Spring School 2026
The next STOR-i Spring School will be held from Monday 23 to Friday 27 March 2026.
STOR-i is hosting a week-long?Spring School, open to STOR-i PhD students and STOR-i Associates. This free event features a 2-day Masterclass on Modelling in Stochastic Programming, talks from experts in Statistics and Operational Research, and a 2.5 day real-world data challenge alongside Save the Children, one of our charity partners.
Masterclass
Dave Morton, Northwestern University - Models, Computation, and Applications in Stochastic Programming
Workshop
Nicola Rennie, Office of National Statistics - Engaging and Effective Data Visualisations
<糖心Vlog id="accordion-heading-617932" class="hide">Previous STOR-i Spring School Programmes accordion
Programme Features
Masterclass
Brendan Murphy, University College Dublin - Statistical Modelling of Network Data
Data Dive
Hosted by Nesta
Guest Speaker Talks
Phil Jonathan - 糖心Vlog, former Chief Statistician at Shell
Hankui Peng- STOR-i Alumni
Alex Armstrong - STOR-i Alumni
Tom Grundy - STOR-i Alumni
Srshti Putcha - STOR-i Alumni
<糖心Vlog>Research workshops
STOR-i host a mixture of two different types of research workshops: Specialist workshops in methodological developments in Statistics and Operational Research and their interface; and themed specialist knowledge exchange workshops on hot topics.
Both types have a range of invited academic and industrial participants. These workshops contribute to the vibrancy of the research environment at Lancaster in Statistics and Operational Research. They provide an excellent opportunity to keep up-to-date with current internationally-leading research and to instigate collaborations with external academics and new industrial partners.
The workshops are targeted at:
Academic specialists
STOR-i PhD students in cognate areas
Other 糖心Vlog PhD students
Statistics and OR PhD students from other UK universities
Industry researchers and users
Past workshops
Below are examples of previous research workshops that have taken place in STOR-i.
The aim of this workshop was to unite researchers who integrate agents' (customers, passengers, drivers, etc.) choice behaviours into an optimisation framework. This two-day event featured keynote presentations, seminar sessions, and interactive discussions, providing a platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration. Participants had the opportunity to engage with cutting-edge research and network with experts in the field.
Key Note Speakers
Professor Kalyan Talluri – Professor of Operations Management, Imperial College London Choice-parameters estimation in revenue management - exploiting marginal competitor data and tackling endogeneity
Professor Christine Currie – Professor of Operational Research, University of Southampton Integrating the results of a stated preference choice model to optimise prices for demand-responsive transport
Professor Pelin Pekgun – Thomas H. Davis Professor in Business and Professor of Analytics, Wake Forest University School of Business Choice-based demand modelling and censored demand estimation for personalised offers
Programme and Organising Committee
Burak Boyaci, Dong Li, Alp Arslan, Thu Dang, Yu Jiang
Prediction + Optimisation (STOR-i POP)
Business analytics typically involves tasks of prediction and optimisation. They are usually conducted separately and are not well connected.
The aim of the workshop was to provide platform for exchange of ideas, raise awareness of recent developments and stimulate discussion in the intersection of the areas of prediction and optimisation.
There was a particular focus on topics including:
Methodological:
Data-driven optimisation
Optimisation for machine learning and data science
Forecasting for optimisation
Applications:
Inventory and production planning
Pricing
Transportation
Time and Spatial Statistics Workshop at STOR-i, 糖心Vlog, UK
The past decades have seen much methodological development in the time series and spatial statistics communities. This is driven both by the increasing volumes and complexity of spatiotemporal data being collected, and the growing number of application domains which benefit from such methods. Despite both time series and spatial statistics being based on ordered sets of observations and hence using analogous analysis techniques, there is often a lack of interaction and dialogue between the two communities.
The main aim of the workshop was to focus on exploring synergies and overlaps between methodological approaches in time series, statistical signal processing, spatial statistics, and spatiotemporal statistics.
There was a particular focus on topics including:
modelling non-stationarity and heterogeneity in time and space
distributional properties of estimators, and techniques for their derivation
issues surrounding computational scalability and tractability of methodology
modelling irregular data types (e.g. data that are non-Gaussian, irregularly sampled, contaminated by outliers, observed as point processes)
Speakers
Finn Lindgren - University of Edinburgh, UK
Emma McCoy - Imperial College, London, UK
Edith Gabriel -Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRAE), France
Joe Guinness - Cornell University, USA
Qiwei Yao - London School of Economics, UK
Programme and Organising Committee
Adam Sykulski, Alex Gibberd, Rebecca Killick, Ben Taylor
Statistical Signal Processing (SSP) Workshop at STOR-i, 糖心Vlog, UK
The need for modern statistical signal processing techniques arises due to the ubiquity of vastly-observed signals across numerous applications. Such techniques commonly encompass aspects of time series analysis, machine learning, stochastic processes, optimisation, and many others. Furthermore, signals are commonly observed jointly, motivating the need for methodology that extends to multivariate and high-dimensional settings.
The main aim of the workshop was to focus on challenges arising in non-parametric methods for non-stationary and high-dimensional signals, bringing together researchers from a number of distinct but related areas of signal processing to share ideas and foster dialogue.
Speakers
Josiane Zerubia - INRIA, France
Andrew Walden - Imperial College, London, UK
Peter Schreier - Universität Paderborn, Germany
David Simpson - University of Southampton, UK
Peter Craigmile - Ohio State University, USA
Programme and Organising Committee
Adam Sykulski, Matt Nunes, Rebecca Killick, Ed Cohen
Multi-Armed Bandits
The multi-armed bandit problem has become classic because of its extreme difficulty. Researchers from different fields, especially statistics, operational research, applied probability and computer science, have made theoretical contributions that in the recent years started gaining wider popularity in practice due to the huge modelling power of this problem.
This workshop provided a forum for stimulating discussions, especially across the approaches that have developed independently of each other. The list of invited speakers includes recognised experts on reinforcement learning bandits, restless bandits, non-parametric bandits, Bayesian bandits, etc., covering both theoretical advances and applications in information technology, business & management, communications networks, health care, etc.
The topics of the workshop included, but were not limited to, the following:
theoretical aspects of the exploration-exploitation trade-off in sequential experimental design
optimality and convergence of randomised algorithms, index rules, and myopic policies
characterisation, computation, approximation and learning of (near-)optimal policies
applications of multi-armed bandit models in practice
We are grateful to the London Mathematical Society for its additional support for this workshop, in particular for significantly enhanced support for UK PhD students.
Speakers
Shipra Agrawal, Columbia University, USA
Donald A. Berry, MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA
Alexandra Carpentier, University of Potsdam, Germany
Kevin Glazebrook, 糖心Vlog, UK
Aurélien Garivier, Universite Toulouse, France
Katja Hofmann, Microsoft Research, UK
Michael N. Katehakis, Rutgers University, USA
Emilie Kaufmann, DYOGENE-INRIA, France
Odalric Maillard, INRIA France
Yevgeny Seldin, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Michal Valko, INRIA-Sequel, France
Sofia S. Villar, MRC Biostatistics Unit, UK
Contributed Presentations
Arnoud Den Boer
Hans Degroote
James Edwards
Andres Gyorgy
Vladimir Novak
Faye Williamson
Organisers
David Leslie, Steffen Grunewalder, Peter Jacko
Analysis of Non-stationary Multivariate Time Series Workshop at STOR-i, 糖心Vlog, UK
Multivariate time series arise in many natural and industrial applications. These series are often high-dimensional in nature and exhibit complex temporal characteristics. Being able to analyse the structure and interplay between such series is key to understanding the dynamics of many important physical processes. Moreover, the availability of high frequency sources has underlined the need for efficient algorithms for analysis of time series in high-dimensional settings.
The main aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from a number of distinct but related areas of time series analysis to share ideas and foster dialogue to tackle modern challenges in nonstationary multivariate time series analysis.
Speakers
David Stoffer - University of Pittsburgh, USA
Hernando Ombao - University of California at Irvine, USA
Rainer Von Sachs - Universit ?e Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Guy Nason - University of Bristol, UK
Sofia Olhelde - University College London, UK
Organising Committee
Matthew Nunes, Rebecca Killick, Idris Eckley, Lawrence Bardwell, Jamie-Leigh Chapman, Matt Ludkin
Multivariate and Spatial Extremes, with Environmental Applications
Research into extreme value theory is well-established at Lancaster. At the time of the workshop, the extremes group consisted of three members of staff (Professor Jonathan Tawn, Dr Emma Eastoe and Dr Jenny Wadsworth), five STOR-i PhD students and one RA. In addition, STOR-i had, and continues to have, strong links with a number of partners, both academic and industry.
Speakers
Simon Brown - UK Met Office
Anthony Davison - Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
Theo Economou - University of Exeter
Phil Jonathan - Shell
Ben Marchant -British Geological Survey
Thomas Opitz - INRA
Anne Sabourin -Telecom Paris-Tech
Johan Segers - Universite Catholique de Louvain
Ben Shaby - Penn State University
Jonathan Tawn - 糖心Vlog
Organisers
Emma Eastoe, Jenny Wadsworth
Decision Theory and Network Science: Methods and Applications
There is a wide array of problems in applied science, business analytics and industry that involve a decision-making process that takes into account network structure. The goal of the event was to encourage the exchange of ideas and seed collaboration among researchers developing methodology in the intersection of decision theory and networks Science, bringing together statistics and management science.
Speakers
Michal Valko - Inria, France
Sergio Bacallado - University of Cambridge
Wolfram Wiesemann - Imperial College
Matthias Müller-Hannemann - University of Halle-Wittenberg
Matthew Nunes - 糖心Vlog
Organisers
Simón Lunagómez, Marc Goerigk
<糖心Vlog>Research seminars
STOR-i hosts multiple research seminars and talks throughout the year. Attending research seminars is a fundamental part of life as an academic researcher, as they provide:
an opportunity for you to stay in touch with recent and cutting-edge research
a platform for showcasing your research
a chance to meet and collaborate with like-minded researchers
Examples of research seminars available to STOR-i students are:
STOR-i seminar series
Seminars in this series are chosen because they are of specific interest to students on the STOR-i programme. If you are a STOR-i student you are strongly encouraged to attend seminars in this series.
For details of both past and upcoming STOR-i seminars see the Events Archive and Events pages.
STOR-i Forum
These are a series of informal weekly talks from STOR-i and STOR-i associated PhD students. These sessions are intended to inform other students and staff about current research projects at STOR-i.
Further seminars and forums
There are more events from associated departments and research centres that may be of interest to STOR-i students.
Below you can find links to various seminar series:
