Title: Enclosing with Simple Bodies
Speaker: Dr. Selin Damla Ahipasaoglu – research officer
Affiliation: Management Science Group at LSE
Location: Room 217 Huxley Building
Time: 2:00pm

Abstract. The Minimum Volume Enclosing Ellipsoid and Minimum Enclosing Ball problems are related to covering a given set of points with an ellipsoid or a ball with the smallest volume possible. These problems have many applications, especially in statistics. We will survey recent theoretical results and take a look at efficient algorithms for solving these problems. We will show that these algorithms can be used for very large data sets.

About the speaker. Selin Damla Ahipasaoglu received her PhD in 2009 from Cornell University under the supervision of Prof. Mike Todd. After her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and London School of Economics. She specialises in developing algorithms for large scale optimization problems, in particular first-order methods for convex problems. She is also working on auctions and game theory. In April 2012, she will be joining the Singapore University of Technology and Design as an assistant professor.