Registration open for Dec. 4 Westwood lecture on business optimization models

Westwood residence (Purdue University photo)

Registration is open for faculty to attend the Westwood Lecture Series, which will now take place on a new date Dec. 4. This event was originally scheduled for Dec. 5.

Mohit Tawarmalani, the executive associate dean of faculty and Allison and Nancy Schleicher Chair in Management in the Mitch Daniels School of Business, will present “Optimization Beyond Convexity: Applications in Process Design, Networking and Pricing” from 4:30-5:30 p.m. Dec. 4 at Westwood, the Purdue president’s residence.

The talk is part of the Westwood Lecture Series, an opportunity for Purdue faculty and those staff members engaged in the research topic to interact with colleagues on scholarly work. The program is aimed at enhancing the intellectual vibrancy of the Purdue West Lafayette campus.

Space is limited to the first 50 faculty who register online.

“Optimization Beyond Convexity: Applications in Process Design, Networking and Pricing”

Mohit Tawarmalani
Executive associate dean of faculty and Allison and Nancy Schleicher Chair in Management
Mitch Daniels School of Business

Abstract. The great fault-line in optimization lies between convexity and non-convexity, the line that divides tractable problems from seemingly treacherous ones. In this talk, Tawarmalani will explore optimization algorithms for nonconvex models that arise from widely disparate sources such as consumer behavior, unpredictability of networks and equilibria of vapor-liquid phases. These models play an important role in decision contexts involving pricing of products, resiliency of operations and design of sustainable processes. He will briefly describe unifying advances, both in higher dimensional embeddings and convexification, that enable solution of practical instances and will conclude with insights into vertical differentiation, operations and leader-follower games.

Bio. Mohit Tawarmalani is the executive associate dean of faculty and Allison and Nancy Schleicher Chair of Management at the Mitch Daniels School of Business. He is also the academic director for the Krenicki Center for Business Analytics and Machine Learning. Tawarmalani’s research interests are at the interface of computer science, optimization and operations research with applications in business and engineering. He serves as an associate editor for the SIAM Journal on Optimization, Journal of Global Optimization and Mathematical Programming Computation. He was co-author of “Convexification and Global Optimization in Continuous and Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming” (Springer) and BARON, a software package widely used for global optimization. His research has been awarded the INFORMS Computing Society Prize, the Beale – Orchard Hays Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Computing in Chemical Engineering award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Tawarmalani received a PhD and master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

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Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives