Invited Speakers

Address
Maxwell Dworkin 229,
SEAS, Harvard University,
33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
parkes - at - eecs.harvard.edu

Lectures
The Design of Incentive Mechanisms through Statistical Machine Learning-- Part I (Auctions)
The Design of Mechanisms without Money through Statistical Machine Learning-- Part II (Social choice and matching)

Short Bio
David C. Parkes is Harvard College Professor, George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science, and Area Dean for Computer Science at Harvard University, where he leads research at the interface between economics and computer science, with a focus on electronic commerce, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and where he founded the EconCS research group. He is a AAAI Fellow, and a recipient of the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Thouron Scholarship, and the Harvard University Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching. Parkes received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and an M. Eng. (First class) in Engineering and Computing Science from the University of Oxford in 1995. Parkes has served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (2011-15), Program Chair of ACM EC'07, AAMAS'08, and AAAI HCOMP'14, and General Chair of ACM EC'10 and WINE 2013. Parkes serves as an Editor of Games and Economic Behavior, and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (Special Track on Human Computation and AI), the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, and the INFORMS Journal of Computing. A technical advisor to Nanigans and Ogwee, Parkes also serves on several international scientific advisory boards, including the Technion-Microsoft Electronic-Commerce Research Center and the Zhejiang-Zurich-Alibaba International Research Center of Service, Economics, Management and Computation.

Address
Sauder School of Business
University of British Columbia
Henry Angus Building, 2053 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada
maurice.queyranne@sauder.ubc.ca

Lectures
Modeling convex subsets of points, Part 1
Modeling convex subsets of points, Part 2

Short Bio
Maurice Queyranne is the Advisory Council Professor in Operations and Logistics in the Sauder School of Business at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Canada. He is currently serving as Research Director for the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), Universite catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) for two academic years in 2014-2016. His research interests extend from discrete optimization to algorithmic game theory, as well as applications to supply chain management, health care management, and mining operations.

Address
School of Operations Research and Information Engineering
Cornell University
224 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, U.S.A.
renegar@cornell.edu

Lectures
A Framework for Applying First-Order Methods to General Convex Conic Optimization Problems
Greater Conic Structure Provides the Basis for Faster Algorithms

Short Bio
James Renegar received the PhD in Mathematics in 1983 at the University of California at Berkeley, under the guidance of Steve Smale. (It was while a PhD student that Renegar first learned of Operations Research (if he had known earlier, he probably would have instead pursued a PhD in OR).)
Throughout his career, Renegar's research has focused on algorithms -- especially on the theory -- including, among other topics, interior-point methods for convex optimization (for which he wrote a well-known introductory monograph), development of the notion of "condition number" in the context of general conic optimization problems, algorithms for hyperbolic programming, and most recently, discovery of a simple framework for solving general convex conic optimization problems by first-order methods.
Renegar has been a faculty member in the School of Operations Research at Cornell since 1987, and was the director (2004-09). He was an invited speaker to the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians, and a semi-plenary speaker at the 2000 International Symposium on Mathematical Programming. Renegar was one of five founding members in 1995 of the Society for Foundations of Computational Mathematics. He long served on its Board of Directors, and also has served in a multitude of other capacities, including his current role as associate editor for the society's journal. Among his other accomplishments, Renegar regularly wins teaching awards at Cornell, a recognition from students which he finds particularly gratifying.

Address
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, 32-D662
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, U.S.A.
j n t "at" m i t "dot" e d u

Lectures
Closed-loop policies for extinguishing an epidemic on a network
Delay, memory, and messaging tradeoffs in distributed service systems

Short Bio
John Tsitsiklis received all of his degrees from MIT and, after a year of teaching at Stanford (1983-84), he has been with the MIT EECS faculty. His interests are in the areas of systems, control, applied probability, and operations research. He has coauthored four books, including "Introduction to Probability" (with D. Bertsekas).
He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and is a co-recipient of several awards, including two INFORMS Computer Society Prizes (1997, 2012) and an ACM Sigmetrics Best Paper Award (2013).