Luis Nunes Vicente has been elected Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization for the upcoming 2023-2025 term. Luis is currently the Timothy J. Wilmott Endowed Chair Professor and Chair of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University.
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is the largest and most prestigious applied math society. Among its many research activity groups, the Optimization one (SIAG/Optimization) was one of the very first groups and is one of the largest, counting with more than 1,000 researchers from academia and industry.
SIAG/Optimization organizes the triennial SIAM Conference on Optimization since 1999. Three prizes are awarded every three years, namely the SIAG/Optimization Best Paper Prize, Early Career Prize, and Test of Time Prize. SIAG/Optimization has a mailing list/discussion board on SIAM’s Engage platform and publishes the biannual newsletter Views-and-News.
The other officers for SIAG/Optimization for the term 2023-2025 are Coralia Cartis (Professor at Oxford University, elected Vice-Chair), Gabriele Eichfelder (Professor at TU Ilmenau, elected Program Director), and Juliane Mueller (Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Lab, elected Secretary).
In his candidate statement Luis said: “Optimization is a beautiful field that has been able to reinvent itself through revolutionary paradigms. The advent of big data and machine learning has recently been impacting optimization profoundly. The source of new problems has been so exciting! Our current challenge is how to simultaneously embrace machine learning and remain faithful to some of our guiding principles of mathematical rigor and numerical benchmarking, and, at the same time, continue to develop relevant optimization applications beyond machine learning. […] SIAM and SIAG/Optimization have been an instrumental means to exchange ideas, promote inclusion, and do more and better Optimization.”