Today’s real-world problems are complex and large, often with overwhelmingly large number of unknown variables which render them doomed to the so-called “curse of dimensionality”. For instance, in energy systems, the system operators should solve optimal power flow, unit commitment, and transmission switching problems with tens of thousands of continuous and discrete variables in real time. In control systems, a long standing question is how to efficiently design structured and distributed controllers for large-scale and unknown dynamical systems. Finally, in machine learning, it is important to obtain simple, interpretable, and parsimonious models for high-dimensional and noisy datasets. Our research is motivated by two main goals: (1) to model these problems as tractable optimization problems; and (2) to develop structure-aware and scalable computational methods for these optimization problems that come equipped with certifiable optimality guarantees. We aim to show that exploiting hidden structures in these problems—such as graph-induced or spectral sparsity—is a key game-changer in the pursuit of massively scalable and guaranteed computational methods.
9.9.2020 MIDAS Faculty Research Pitch Video.
My research lies at the intersection of optimization, data analytics, and control.
Accomplishments and Awards
- 2021 Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grant Award: IPODS: Innovative and Powerful Optimization Methods for Data Science with Statistical Guarantees