LION20: Learning and Intelligent Optimization Conference 2026
📅 Monday, 15 June 2026 → Friday, 19 June 2026
LION 20 — the 20th Learning and Intelligent Optimization Conference, Milan, 15–19 June; keynotes incl. Jürgen Schmidhuber.
LION 20, the 20th Learning and Intelligent Optimization Conference, runs 15–19 June 2026 in Milan (University of Milano-Bicocca / Grand Hotel Villa Torretta), with proceedings in Springer LNCS. It explores the intersection of machine learning, AI, operations research and metaheuristics — how learning can make optimisation smarter, and vice versa.
What you gain & who presents
Extended keynotes pair a tutorial with a state-of-the-art talk. The 2026 line-up is exceptional: Jürgen Schmidhuber ("father of modern AI") on AI and the future of the universe, Andrea Lodi (Cornell Tech) on mixed-integer programming meeting AI, and Wolfram Wiesemann (Imperial) on data-driven Markov decision processes — plus industry talks (STMicroelectronics, Hexaly) and special sessions on LLMs for optimisation, RL-as-optimizer and Bayesian optimisation.
Where it fits
As LLMs start to generate heuristics and agents must plan under uncertainty, the learning-meets-optimisation frontier LION owns is increasingly central to real-world decision systems in logistics, energy, finance and robotics.
