PhD defense of Alp Yurtsever
Alp's defense photo © V. Cevher /2019 EPFL
On Tuesday 27th August 2019, Alp Yurtsever, a PhD student at LIONS lab, successfully defended his PhD thesis. The thesis, entitled Scalable Convex Optimization Methods for Semidefinite Programming was supervised by Prof. Volkan Cevher.
On Tuesday 27th August 2019, Alp Yurtsever, a PhD student at LIONS lab, successfully defended his PhD thesis. The thesis, entitled Scalable Convex Optimization Methods for Semidefinite Programming was supervised by Prof. Volkan Cevher.
Abstract: With the ever-growing data sizes along with the increasing problem complexity in modern applications, classical optimization algorithms impose heavy burdens on the arithmetic and storage resources. As a result, there is a recent trend where heuristic approaches with unverifiable assumptions are overtaking more rigorous, conventional methods. Our recent research results show that this trend can be overturned when we jointly exploit dimensionality reduction and adaptivity in optimization at its core. In this thesis, we present a convex optimization paradigm which makes it possible to solve trillion dimensional semidefinite programming relaxations to combinatorial decision problems on a regular personal computer.