Young Researcher Competition
Competition Winners
Alexandre Belloni, Duke University - Competition Winner
Norm-induced Densities and Testing the Boundedness of a Convex Set
Alexandre Belloni is an Assistant Professor in The Fuqua School of
Business at Duke University. During the year 2006-2007 he was a Herman
Goldstine Post-doctoral Fellow at the IBM Watson Research Center in
Yorktown. He earned his B.Eng. from
the Pontifical Catholic University and his M.Sc. in Mathematical
Economics from the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, both
in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He started his PhD studies at MIT in 2002
under the supervision of Robert Freund. He graduated in 2006. His
research interest spans over diverse topics in mathematical
programming, statistics/econometrics, probabilistic methods,
complexity theory and applications to engineering, management
science, marketing and economics. Throughout his studies he received
several awards and fellowships from IBM, SIAM and MIT. He received
Second Prize at the INFORMS 2006 George Nicholson Student Paper
Award competition. In August 2007 he joined The Fuqua School of
Business at Duke University as an Assistant Professor of Decision
Sciences. In his spare time he plays field hockey and is a member of
the Brazilian national team and also the Boston team.
Mung Chiang, Princeton University - Competition Finalist
Geometric Programming for Communication Systems
Mung Chiang is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and
an affiliated faculty of Applied and Computational Mathematics and
of Computer Science at Princeton University. He received the B.S.
(Honors) in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. His
research areas include nonlinear optimization of communication
systems, especially optimization algorithms in broadband access
networks, Internet, and wireless networks. Dr. Chiang is the Lead
Guest Editor of the Special Issue of IEEE Journal of Selected Areas
in Communications on Nonlinear Optimization of Communication
Systems and a co-editor of the new Springer book series on
Optimization and Control of Communication Systems. He has received NSF
CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Princeton University Wentz
Junior Faculty Award, Stanford University School of Engineering Terman
Award, SBC Communications New Technology
Introduction Contribution Award, and Hertz Foundation Fellowship.
One of his papers became the Fast Breaking Paper in Computer Science
in 2006 according to ISI's citation frequency. He co-authored papers
that received best student paper award at IEEE GLOBECOM and best
paper award finalists at IEEE VTC and INFOCOM. He is recently
selected in TR35 as one of the top 35 young technologists in the
world under the age of 35 by Technology Review Magazine.
Eissa Nematollahi, McMaster University - Competition Finalist
How Good Are Interior Point Methods? Klee-Minty Cubes Tighten
Iteration-complexity Bounds
Eissa Nematollahi is a graduating PhD student at the Department of
Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University, supervised by
Tamás Terlaky. He is an active member of the Advanced Optimization
Laboratory. Before coming to Canada in 2004, he earned his
undergraduate degree from Tabriz University and received his M.Sc.
degree from Sharif University of Technology in Iran. During his PhD
studies he spent three months at the Center for Operations Research
and Econometrics (CORE) at the Université catholique de Louvain in
Belgium as a Marie Curie Scholarship holder.
His research projects are centred around the properties of the
central path of linear optimization problems and in particular, the
effect of redundant constraints on the geometry of the central path.
He studied both the theory and the algorithms to solve these
problems. He was the first to show that the complexity of classical
path-following interior point methods cannot be improved further.
CALL for PAPERS by YOUNG RESEARCHERS in CONTINUOUS OPTIMIZATION
Second Mathematical Programming
Society International Conference on Continuous Optimization
ICCOPT II
(McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, August 12-16, 2007)
Submissions are invited for a special session at ICCOPT II dedicated to papers
authored by young researchers.
The submitted papers should be in the area of continuous optimization and
satisfy one of the following three criteria:
| a) |
passed the first round of normal refereeing process in an
open journal; |
| b) |
published in the year of 2005 or after (including
forthcoming); |
| c) |
certified by a thesis advisor or postdoctoral mentor as a
well-polished paper that is ready for submission to an open journal.
|
Papers can be single-authored or multi-authored, subject to the following
criterion:
| d) |
Each paper must have at least one principal author who
was under age 30 on January 1, 2003 and has not earned a Ph.D before
that date. In case of joint authorship involving senior researchers
(i.e., those who fail both the age test and the Ph.D. test), one senior
author must certify the pivotal role and the principal contribution of
the qualifying author in the work. The Selection Committee will decide
on questions on eligibility in exceptional cases.
|
The selection criteria will be based solely on the quality of the paper,
including originality of results and potential impact.
The following items are required for submission:
| A) |
the paper for consideration; |
| B) |
a brief description of the contribution (limited to 2
pages) |
| C) |
a statement about the status of the paper: not submitted,
under review, accepted, or published (when) in a journal; |
| D) |
a certification of the principal author's eligibility in
terms of age and Ph.D. (by the first author's advisor or department
chair); |
| E) |
in case of joint authorship involving a senior
researcher, a certification by the latter individual about the
qualifying author's pivotal role and principal contribution.
|
The deadline for submission is April 7, 2007.
Submission should be sent
electronically in Adobe Acrobat pdf format, to the Chair of the Selection
Committee, Professor Kees Roos, email address:
c.roos@tudelft.nl.
Up to 4 papers will be selected; the selected papers will be featured in a
dedicated session in ICCOPT II; travel expenses of the first authors of the
selected papers will be partially paid for by the Conference. If a selected
paper has not been published nor submitted for publication, the author(s) will
be invited to submit the paper for publication in the special Mathematical
Programming, Series B issue of ICCOPT papers, which will be subject to the usual
review of a Mathematical Programming paper. Selection Committee:
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