Join Professor Ruth Misener, online or in person, for her Imperial Inaugural.

We have limited in-person spaces available so please ensure you register in advance via Eventbrite.

Abstract

In computational optimisation, a relaxation of a difficult-to-solve optimisation problem is an easier-to-solve approximation with special properties. Application are wide and varied, from manufacturing to and logistics to machine learning, and can also include bioprocess optimisation under uncertainty and petrochemical process network design and operations.

Ruth Misener is Professor in Computational Optimisation at Imperial College London whose work has focused on developing relaxations and other approaches to expedite the solution of challenging optimisation problems. In her inaugural lecture, she will explore the possible future impacts of these relaxations whilst acknowledging her ironic struggles to achieve more traditional forms of relaxation in her real life.

Biography

Dr Ruth Misener (she/her) is a Professor in Computational Optimisation in the Department of Computing. Foundations of her research are in numerical optimisation algorithms and computational software. Her applications focus on optimisation challenges arising in industry, e.g. scheduling in manufacturing or experimental design in chemicals research. Ruth also contributes at the interface between operations research and machine learning. Ruth received an SB from MIT (2007) and her PhD (2012), from Princeton.

Ruth is the BASF/RAEng Research Chair in Data-Driven Optimisation (2022-27). She received the Macfarlane Medal as the overall winner of the 2017 RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition. Her work has been recognized with best paper awards from: the Journal of Global Optimization (2013), International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (Best Innovative Demo, 2020), Conference on the Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, & Operations Research (2021), and Optimization & Engineering (2021). Ruth’s research team develops popular open-source code (https://github.com/cog-imperial), for example the Optimisation & Machine Learning Toolkit (OMLT, https://github.com/cog-imperial/OMLT) won the 2022 COIN-OR Cup for its contribution to open-source operations research software development.