Winner
Amir Ali Ahmadi (Department of Operations Research & Financial Engineering, Princeton University, USA)
Citation
The INFORMS Optimization Society 2024 Egon Balas Prize is awarded to Amir Ali Ahmadi for their contributions in the area of optimization. Amir Ali Ahmadi (Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University, USA) earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. After postdoctoral work at CSAIL and LIDS at MIT and as a Herman Goldstine Fellow at the IBM Watson Research Center, Dr. Ahmadi joined Princeton in 2014, where he is now a full professor.
Dr. Ahmadi has made deep and broad contributions in mathematical optimization with many connections to other fields including mathematics, control theory, and robotics. He has made significant advances in the study of optimization problems defined by polynomial functions, including the complexity of finding local minima and detecting convexity of polynomials. Other contributions include an algebraic characterization of perfect graphs, linear and second-order cone programming approaches to certify nonnegativity of polynomials, higher-order Newton methods for nonlinear optimization, and the construction of Lyapunov functions for switch systems in control theory. Dr. Ahmadi’s contributions include the resolution of several problems that have been open for many years.
In recognition of his achievements, Dr. Ahmadi has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers as well as career awards from NSF, AFOSR and DARPA, a Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the INFORMS Optimization Society Young Researchers Prize, and the INFORMS Computing Society Prize.
The breadth of Dr. Ahmadi’s contributions, their mathematical depth and the overall impact on the field are impressive and richly deserving of the Egon Balas prize.
Prize committee
Amitabh Basu, Jim Luedtke(chair), Ted Ralphs, John Mitchell, Hande Benson