Address
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands
abental@ie.technion.ac.il

Lectures
Robust Optimization - Methodology and Applications (Tuesday 15.15 - 16.00)
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The Ordered Set Mirror Descent Algorithm and Its Use in Medical Imaging (Wednesday 10.00 - 10.45)
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Short Bio
Aharon Ben-Tal is a Professor of Operations Research in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1973, and joined the Technion in 1975.  He has held visiting positions at McGill University, University of British Columbia, University of Michigan, Princeton, and University of Copenhagen.
His research interests are:  convex analysis, nonlinear programming, nonsmooth optimization, stochastic programming, and applications of optimization in engineering design.
Professor Ben-Tal is the co-author of the book Optimality in Nonlinear Programming: A Feasible Direction Approach, Wiley Interscience, 1981 and has published more than 80 papers in the Operations Research/Applied Mathematics literature.  Professor Ben-Tal served as Area Editor Mathematics of Operations Research} (1993-1999); he is currently on the editorial board of  SIAM J, Optimization, J. Convex Analysis and Math. Modeling and Num. Analysis.  His professional activities include:  Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion (1988--1991); Head of the MINERVA Optimization Center at the Technion (1991 - present), and Council Member of the Mathematical Programming Society  (1994 -1998).
 
 

Address
University of Padova
Italy
conforti@math.unipd.it

Lectures (click for postscript file of abstract)
The Parity of Chordless Cycles in Graphs (Tuesday 11.00 - 11.45)
Bicoloring of Matrices and Integer Polyhedra (Wednesday 11.15 - 12.00)

Short Bio
Michele Conforti is a Professor at the University of Padua. In 1983 he received his Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are graph theory, combinatorial optimization and polyhedral combinatorics. He is associate editor for Mathematics of Operations Research. Michele Conforti is most well-known for his work on the decomposition and recognition of balanced matrices. In 2000, he and his co-authors G. Cornu\'ejols and M. R. Rao, received the Fulkerson Prize (awarded by the AMS and the MPS) for their paper Decomposition of Balanced Matrices.
 
 

Address
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Mathematics
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
goemans@math.mit.edu
http://www-math.mit.edu/~goemans

Lectures
Semidefinite programming and approximation algorithms (Tuesday 16.15 - 17.00)
Approximating ternary optimization problems via complex semidefinite programming (Wednesday 16.45 - 17.30)
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Short Bio
Michel Goemans is an Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests are broadly in combinatorial optimization and has made several contributions to the area of approximation algorithms. Michel Goemans is most well-known for his use, jointly with David Williamson, of semidefinite programming to approximate the maximum cut problem. His past awards include the 2000 Fulkerson prize (awarded by the AMS and the MPS), twice the SIAM optimization prize (1996 and 1999), the 1991 Tucker prize, an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship (1995--1997), an NSF CAREER award (1996-2000), and an IBM partnership award (1999).
 
 

Address
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332, USA
Phone (404) 894-2305
Fax (404) 894-2301
rserfozo@isye.gatech.edu
http://www.isye.gatech.edu/people/homepages/richard_serfozo.html

Lectures
Equilibrium Behavior of Stochastic Networks (Tuesday 12.00 - 12.45)
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Travel Times and Flows in Stochastic Networks (Wednesday 15.45 - 16.30)
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Short Bio
Richard Serfozo received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1969. He is a co-founder of the Center for Applied Probablity (CAP) in Georgia Tech. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications. He is also a past area editor of the mathematics of Operations Research.
Research Interests: Applied probability and stochastic processes: stochastic networks in manufacturing and communications, extreme value theory, point processes, parallel simulation. Optimization of stochastic systems: Markov decision processes, control of queues, design of service systems.
He is the author of "Introduction to Stochastic Networks" published by Springer-Verlag in 1999.
 
 

Address
Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027, USA
Phone: 212  854 1477
Fax: 212 854 8103
perwez@ieor.columbia.edu
http://www.ieor.columbia.edu/~perwez

Lectures
Rare event simulation techniques for models of computer and communication systems (Wednesday 09.00 - 09.45)
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Simulating rare events in a canonical random walk with heavy tailed increments with applications to queueuing and insurance (Wednesday 12.15 - 13.00)
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Short Bio
Perwez Shahabuddin is  an  Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research  at Columbia University, New York. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.  He received his Ph.D in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1990.  His research interests  include stochastic modeling methodologies, and discrete event and Monte Carlo simulation methodologies for  telecommunications, financial and reliability applications. His research has been funded by NSF, AT&T, IBM and AUM Systems.  While at IBM, he   was one of the developers of the System Availability Estimator (SAVE) modeling tool. Prof. Shahabuddin has  received the  Outstanding Simulation Publication Award  from  INFORMS, a  CAREER Award from NSF, and  a University Partnership Award from IBM. He is also a recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award given by the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association. He serves on the editorial board of Management Science, Stochastic Models, IIE Transactions on Operations Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, and ACM TOMACS (Guest Editor).