This book constitutes selected and revised papers presented at the First International Conference on Optimization, Learning Algorithms and Applications, OL2A 2021, held in Bragança, Portugal, in July 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 39 full papers and 13 short papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. They are organized in the topical sections on optimization theory; robotics; measurements with the internet of things; optimization in control systems design; deep learning; data visualization and virtual reality; health informatics; data analysis; trends in engineering education.