Dear scheduling researcher, We are delighted to announce the talk given by Thomas Lidbetter (Rutgers University). The title is "Min sum ordering problems with applications to scheduling". The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, June 4 at 13:00 UTC. Join Zoom Meeting https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/97914930603?pwd=6nVlX7rd8Izi32aF3kLIm00Wd1qbEa.1 Meeting ID: 979 1493 0603 Passcode: 477966 You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A The abstract follows. We consider a large family of problems in which an ordering (or, more precisely, a chain of subsets) of a finite set must be chosen to minimize some weighted sum of costs. This family includes variations of min sum set cover, several scheduling and search problems, and problems in Boolean function evaluation. We define a problem, called the min sum ordering problem (MSOP), which generalizes all these problems using a cost and a weight function defined on subsets of a finite set. By making certain assumptions on the structure of the cost and weight functions, we derive general approximation results that can be applied to several problems. This talk will be based on two joint works with Robbert Fokkink, László Végh, Felix Happach and Lisa Hellerstein. The next talk in our series will be in September. For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/ With kind regards Zdenek Hanzalek, Michael Pinedo and Guohua Wan -- Zdenek Hanzalek Industrial Informatics Department, Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/