Fall 2019 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
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Stephen Boyd,
Stanford University
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Abstract
Convex optimization has emerged as useful tool for applications that include data analysis and model fitting, resource allocation, engineering design, network design and optimization, finance, and control and signal processing. After an overview of the mathematics, algorithms, and software frameworks for convex optimization, we turn to common theme that arise across applications, such as sparsity and relaxation. We describe recent work on real-time embedded convex optimization, in which small problems are solved repeatedly in millisecond or microsecond time frames, and large-scale distributed convex optimization, in which many solvers are coordinated to solve enormous problems.
Biosketch
Stephen P. Boyd is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Information Systems Laboratory, and chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He has courtesy appointments in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and is a member of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. His current research focus is on convex optimization applications in control, signal processing, machine learning, and finance.
Professor Boyd received an AB degree in Mathematics, summa cum laude, from Harvard University in 1980, and a PhD in EECS from U. C. Berkeley in 1985. In 1985 he joined the faculty of Stanford's Electrical Engineering Department. He has held visiting Professor positions at Katholieke University (Leuven), McGill University (Montreal), Ecole Polytechnique Federale (Lausanne), Tsinghua University (Beijing), Universite Paul Sabatier (Toulouse), Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), Kyoto University, Harbin Institute of Technology, NYU, MIT, UC Berkeley, CUHK-Shenzhen, City University of Hong Kong, and IMT Lucca. He holds honorary doctorates from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, and Catholic University of Louvain (UCL).
Professor Boyd has received many awards and honors for his research in control systems engineering and optimization, including an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the AACC Donald P. Eckman Award. In 2013, he received the IEEE Control Systems Award, given for outstanding contributions to control systems engineering, science, or technology. In 2012, Michael Grant and he were given the Mathematical Optimization Society's Beale-Orchard-Hays Award, given every three years for excellence in computational mathematical programming. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, SIAM, and INFORMS, a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He has been invited to deliver more than 90 plenary and keynote lectures at major conferences in control, optimization, signal processing, and machine learning.
At Stanford, he has served as director of the Information Systems Laboratory, chair of the (university wide) Library Committee, chair of the David Packard EE Building Planning & Design Committee, and as a member of the (university wide) Advisory Board.