Invited Speakers
Aharon Ben-Tal
Address
William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Technion City, Haifa 32000, Israel
abental@ie.technion.ac.il
Lectures
The power of Duality
Tractable solutions to some challenging optimization problems
Short Bio
Aharon Ben-Tal is a Professor of Operations Research and Head of the MINERVA Optimization
Center at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion - Israel Institute of
Technology, and holder of the Dresner Chair. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from
Northwestern University in 1973. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan,
University of Copenhagen, Delft University of Technology and MIT. Currently he is a Visiting
Distinguished Scientist at CWI Amsterdam. His interests are in Continuous Optimization,
particularly nonsmooth and large-scale problems, conic and robust optimization, as well as
convex and nonsmooth analysis. Recently the focus of his research is on optimization problems
affected by uncertainty. In the last 15 years, he has devoted much effort to engineering applications
of optimization methodology and computational schemes. Some of the algorithms developed in
the MINERVA Optimization Center are in use by Industry ( Medical Imaging, Aerospace).
He has published more than 110 papers in professional journals and co-authored three books:
Optimality in Nonlinear Programming: A Feasible Direction Approach (Wiley-Interscience, 1981)
Lectures on Modern Convex Optimization: Analysis, Algorithms and Engineering Applications
(SIAM-MPS series on optimization, 2001) and Robust Optimization (Princeton University press,2009).
Prof. Ben-Tal was Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion (1989-1992).
He served as a council member of the Mathematical Programming Society (1994-1997). He was
Area Editor (Continuous Optimization) of Math. of Operations Research (1993-1999), member
of the Editorial Board of SIAM J. Optimization, J. Convex Analysis, OR Letters, Mathematical
Programming, Management Science and Math. Modeling and Numerical Analysis,
European J. of Operations Research and Computational Management Science.
In 2007 Professor Ben-Tal was awarded the EURO Gold Medal - the highest
distinction of Operations Research within Europe.
In 2009 he was named Fellow of INFORMS.
Jim Dai
Address
315 Groseclose Building
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
765 Ferst Drive, NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0205
Anti_spam_Email: his_last_name at isye.gatech.edu
Lectures
Maximum pressure policies in stochastic processing networks
Positive recurrence of reflecting Brownian motions in three dimensions
Short Bio
Jim Dai is the Eden eld Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering at
Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a Special Term Professor at Tsinghua
University and a James Riady Distinguished Visiting Professor in Decision
Sciences at National University of Singapore. Over the last twenty years,
he has worked on stochastic models arising from manufacturing and service
systems including communication networks, semiconductor wafer fabrication
lines, call centers, and healthcare-delivery systems.
Jim Dai received B.A. and M.S. degrees from Nanjing University and a
Ph.D. degree from Stanford University. He is an elected fellow of Institute
of Mathematical Statistics and an elected fellow of Institute for Operations
Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has received nu-
merous awards for his research contributions including The Best Publication
Award in 1997 and The Erlang Prize in 1998, both from the Applied Prob-
ability Society of INFORMS. He has served as an associate editor for six
journals including Management of Science and Operations Research. He
is currently an Area Editor for Mathematics of Operations Research and a
past Series Editor for Handbooks in Operations Research and Management
Science.
Jean Bernard Lasserre
Address
LAAS-CNRS
7 Avenue du Colonel Roche
31 077 Toulouse Cedex 4, France
Anti_spam_Email: his_last_name at laas.fr
Lectures
The moment-sos approach
New extensions of the moment-sos approach
Short Bio
J.B. Lasserre got his PhD (1978) and "Doctorat d'Etat" (1984) degrees
both from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse (France). He has been at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse since 1980, where he is now Directeur de Recherche.
He is also a member of IMT, the Institute of Mathematics of Toulouse. He was a one year visitor (1978-79 and 1985-86) at the Electrical
Engineering Dept. of the University of California at Berkeley with a fellowship from Inria and NSF. He has done several one-month visits to
Stanford University (Stanford, California), MIT (Cambridge), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, Berkeley), the Fields Institute
(Fields, Toronto), the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA, Minneapolis), Cinvestav-IPN (Cinvestav, Mexico),
Leiden University (Leiden, The Netherlands), the Tinbergen Institute (Tinbergen, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), the University of Adelaide
(Adelaide, Australia), the University of South Australia (UniSA, Adelaide), the University of Queensland (Brisbane). He wrote about 130 papers
and co-authored the five books ``Markov Control Processes: Basic Optimality Criteria" (Springer 1996),
``Further Topics in Markov Control Processes" (Springer 1999), ``Markov Chains and Invariant Probabilities" (Birkhauser 2003),
``Linear & Integer Programming vs Linear Integration and Counting" (Springer 2009), and ``Moments, Positive Polynomials and Their Applications"
(Imperial College Press, 2009). He is the 2009 recipient of the Lagrange prize in Continuous optimization.
Mohit Singh
Address
McConnell Engineering Building,
McGill University,
3480 University Street,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2A7
Anti_spam_Email: his_first_name at cs.mcgill.ca
Lectures
Iterative Methods in Combinatorial Optimization I: Iterative Rounding
Iterative Methods in Combinatorial Optimization II: Iterative Relaxation
Short Bio
Mohit Singh is an Assistant Professor at School of Computer Science, McGill
University. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft
Research, New England. He completed his Ph.D. in 2008 in the ACO
(Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization) program at Tepper School of
Business, Carnegie Mellon University where his advisor was Prof. R. Ravi.
His research interests include approximation algorithms, combinatorial
optimization and studying models which deal with uncertainty in data. His
thesis on Iterative Methods in Combinatorial Optimization was awarded the
Tucker prize by Mathematical Programming Society in 2009.
|
