[abhishekbasu]

I've always had the impression that Mathematical programming esp. Mixed integer programming/Integer programming is largely "unknown" outside of core engineering and operations research. It's an excellent framework to solve a whole host of problems that arise in business and elsewhere, which are solved using suboptimal (hah) heuristics instead.

Okay, maybe I was a bit harsh, but it definitely doesn't pop up as often as deep learning and statistical machine learning. For those who wish to get deeper into this, I highly recommend Optimization over Integers by Bertsimas and Weismantel.

[CuriouslyC]

Oh yeah, there are whole subfields of engineering that the current crop of AI deep learning engineers are mostly unfamiliar with. I've been able to find places where I can make significant advances on the state of the art in AI through incorporation of concepts from decision theory, control theory, process engineering, constraint optimization, etc.

[taeric]

The amusing ones, to me, are the people that know of the techniques, but are convinced they can't apply.

Obviously not everything will be easy to map into a classic optimization problem. And you may have a heuristic approach that is better for a problem. But the general solvers out there have gone a long long way.