José Verschae
Associate Professor
Instituto de Ingeniería Matemática y Computacional
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
jverschae "at" uc "dot" cl
Edificio Interdisciplinario, 5th Floor, Of 511, Campus San Joaquín UC
Avda. Vicuña Mackenna 4860
Santiago, Chile
I am an associate professor at the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at UC (IMC) and the curricular director of the Bachelor’s Degree in Data Science Engineering. I'am also an associate editor of OR Letters and Acta Informatica.
[July 2025] Our paper "Tight running times for minimum ell_q-norm load balancing: beyond exponential dependencies on 1/eps", with L. Chen and L. Tao, has just been accepted at Mathematics of Operations Research (MOR).
[July 2025] Our paper "Randomized Binary and Tree Search Under Pressure", with A. Caracci and C. Dürr, has just been published in the Proceedings of ICALP 2025 [pdf].
[March 2025] I'm the co-chair of WAOA 2025 together with Jannik Matuschke.
[Dec 2025] I serve on the program committee for IPCO 2025 and ICALP 2025.
[June 2024} I serve on the program committee of APPROX 2024.
[May 2023] I became an associate editor of Acta Informatica. Please consider submitting your work to us.
[Sept 2022] I became an associate editor of the OR Letters journal. Please consider submitting your work to us.
My project Fondecyt Regular "Symmetry Handling Methods: Fundamental Domains, Vector Orderings, and Partial Symmetries" is running. If you are a student looking for a master or PhD thesis with a strong background in mathematics, algorithms and/or optimization, feel free to contact me!
Until July 2024, I'm on a sabbatical period. During May and June 2024 I'll be visiting Columbia University. If you are interested in meeting me there, let me know!
Our paper "Identifying outbreaks in sewer networks: An adaptive sampling scheme under network’s uncertainty" [link], together with J Baboun, I Beaudry, L Castro, F Gutierrez, A Jara, and B Rubio has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) [pnas]. See here for a note about it in spanish.
I'm in the program committee of LAGOS 2023, FCT 2023, and LATIN 2024.
Our paper with M. Villagra and L. von Niederhäusern, On the Geometry of Symmetry Breaking Inequalities, has just been accepted to Mathematical Programming.
Our paper A Water-Filling Primal-Dual Algorithm for Approximating Non-Linear Covering Problems with Andrés Fielbaum and Ignacio Morales has just been accepted to SIDMA.
I'm giving the talk "A Primal-Dual Approximation Framework for Weighted Integer Covering Problems" at the Encuentro SOMACHI 2021 in UOH, Rancagua.
The XV Summer School in Discrete Mathematics will take place online next January with a set of excellent speakers. Don't hesitate to apply!
Our paper "Tight running times for minimum l_q-norm load balancing: beyond exponential dependencies on 1/\epsilon" with Lin Chen and Liangde Tao [arxiv] has just been accepted into SODA 2022.
We just uploaded a new version of our article "On the Geometry of Symmetry Breaking Inequalities" to ArXiv.
Our Summer School of Discrete Mathematics 2021 appeared in the March 2021 IFORs newsletter.
I have been invited to give a talk at MIP 2021 (online event). See the talk here.
I have been invited to give a talk at the OR seminar of Carnegie Melon University, in March 2021.
Our article "On the Geometry of Symmetry Breaking Inequalities" together with Matías Villagra and Léonard von Niederhäusern has been accepted to IPCO 2021 [pdf].
I am the chair of the Escuela de Verano de Matemáticas Discretas 2021.
I gave the talk "Simetrías en Optimización Discreta: Grupos y Geometría pdfpara un Mejor Diseño de Algoritmos" (in spanish) at the IMC seminar (09/09/2020).
Our paper " Symmetry Exploitation for Online Machine Covering with Bounded Migration" together with Waldo Galvez and José Soto has been accepted to ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
Our paper "Breaking symmetries to rescue SoS: The case of makespan scheduling" together with V. Verdugo and A. Wiese has been accepted to Mathematical Programming.
Our paper "A Water-Filling Primal-Dual Algorithm for Approximating Non-Linear Covering Problems" together with Andrés Fielbaum and Ignacio Morales has been accepted for ICALP 2020.
I specialize in combinatorial optimization and algorithm analysis. My main area of research is approximation and online algorithms, mostly for scheduling, network design, and search problems on graphs. One of my latest projects is on understanding the implications of encountering symmetries in polyhedral combinatorics and how these symmetries can be exploited. In general, I have a broad interest in discrete mathematics, optimization, and theoretical computer science.
A. Antoniadis, J. Baboun, P. Barceló, I. Beaudry, A. Caracci, R. Carrasco, M. Castro, L. Chen, M. Cheung, J. Correa, D. Dadush, C. Dürr, F. Eisenbrand, A. Fielbaum, M. Pfetsch, W. Galvez, A. Gupta, K. Jansen, A. Jara, T. Harks, N. Hänle, C. Hojny, C.-C. Huang, K.-M. Klein, A. Kozachinskiy, A. Léonard, A. Marchetti-Spaccamela, S. T. McCormick, N. Megow, J. Mestre, J. Matuschke, I. Morales, M. Niemeier, S. Ott, B. Peis, K. Pruhs, M. Romero, R. Rischke, L. Rohwedder, U. Schmidt-Kraepelin, J. Soto, A. Schedel, A. Schulz, M. Skutella, D. B. Shmoys, C. Stein, B. Subercaseaux, O. Svensson, L. Stougie, B. Rubio, V. Verdugo, M. Villagra, L. von Niederhäusern, A. Wierz, A. Wiese.
Víctor Verdugo (co-advised with J. Correa), Ms Applied Math, UCH, 2014. Currently: Prof. Catholic University of Chile.
Christian von Borries (co-advised with J. Soto), Ms Applied Math, UCH, 2014. Currently: Software Engineer at Facebook.
Waldo Galvez (co-advised with J. Soto), Ms Applied Math, UCH, 2015. Currently: Assistant Prof. U de Concepción.
Ignacio Morales, Ms Industrial Engineering, U Católica, 2018. Currently: Jefe de proyectos BI y Analytics en Mosaico S.A.
Manuel Rogers, Ms Industrial Engineering, U Católica, 2018. Currently: Data Scientists at VTR.
Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ms Math. (co-advised with J. Matuschke), TU Munich, 2018. Currently: Prof. TU Eindhoven.
Matias Víllagra, Ms Mathematics, U Catolica, 2020. Currently: PhD student, Columbia U.
José Baboun, Ms Engineering Sciences, U Católica, 2023.
Benjamín Rubio, Ms Engineering Sciences, U Católica, 2023. Currently: PhD. Student, Columbia U.
Agustín Caracci, Ms Mathematical and Computational Eng., U Católica, 2024. Currently at Alicanto Labs.
Juan Cristobal Hernández (co-advised with G. Angulo), Ms Engineering Sciences, U Católica, current.
Vicente Opazo, Ms Engineering Sciences, U Católica, current.
Jasper van Doornmalen. Funding: Fondecyt Postdoctoral Grant (2025-2028).
WAOA 2025 (co-chair) : ICALP 2025 : IPCO 2025: APPROX 2024 : LATIN 2024 : LAGOS 2023 : FCT 2023 : LATIN 2018