Speaker: Farid Alizadeh, Department of Management Science and Information Systems, Rutgers Business School

Bio: Farid Alizadeh received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. After spending two years as a postdoctoral associate at the University of California-Berkeley, he joined Rutgers, first at Rutgers Center for Operations Research and then at Rutgers Business School. Alizadeh is credited for laying the foundation of semidefinite programming (SDP), in particular, extending interior point algorithms from linear programming to SDP, and applying them to solve some combinatorial optimization problems. Later he, along with many others, extended these techniques to symmetric cones, in particular, second-order cones. Presently, his research is focused on developing simplex-like algorithms for some concrete SDP and SOCP problems. He is a recipient of the 2014 INFORMS Optimization Society Farkas Prize.