With the end of the academic year looming near, a small crowd gathered outside of the SBE on a Tuesday evening for an all-time classic SCOPE | Vectum activity; The Research Lecture! For this lecture we welcomed Tjark Vredeveld, an Associate Professor from the KE department, in the field of Operations Research / Quantitive Economics. Most of us already knew Tjark as the course coordinator of the Second Year Operations Research course. That being said, it was very interesting to gain some insight into the actual research he is conducting. The lecture covered Prophet Inequalities. The classic prophet inequality states that, when faced with a finite sequence of non-negative independent random variables, a gambler who knows their distribution and is allowed to stop the sequence at any time, can obtain in expectation at least half as much reward as an all-knowing prophet who knows the values of each random variable and can choose the largest one. In his lecture, Tjak spoke on some recent developments in this field, as well as highlighting several compelling open problems. Overall, it was a very nice and enjoyable presentation, that provided our members with some very valuable insights.
Thank you once again for the lecture Tjark!
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