Péter Biró, Márton Gyetvai (KRTK, Corvinus MSM Institute): Online voluntary mentoring: Optimising the assignment of students and mentors

Our talk will have two parts. First, we give an introduction to optimisation in two-sided matching markets by giving details also on practical results in different applications, such as the Hungarian university admission scheme. Then we present a novel application for allocating voluntary mentors to students. After the closure of the schools in Hungary from March 2020 due to the pandemic, many students were left at home with no or not enough parental help for studying, and, in the meantime some people had more free time and willingness to help others in need during the lockdown. In this paper we describe the optimisation aspects of a joint NGO project for allocating voluntary mentors to students using a web-based coordination mechanism. Our goal has been to form optimal pairs and study groups by taking into the preferences and the constraints of the participants. We present the optimisation concept, the integer programming techniques used, and some simulation results conducted on real and generated datasets.

If you wish to receive a link for the zoom meeting on the day of the event, please send an email to Tamás Solymosi (tamas dot solymosi at uni dash corvinus dot hu)