Title: More Virtuous Smoothing and Embracing the Ghost of Rolle
Speaker: Prof Jon Lee
Affiliation: Industrial and Operations Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Michigan
Location: LT 308 Huxley Building
Time: 14:00 – 15:00

Abstract. In the context of global optimization of mixed-integer nonlinear optimization formulations, we consider smoothing univariate concave increasing functions that have poorly behaved derivative at 0 (for example, root functions). Extending earlier work of Lee and Skipper, we give general conditions under which our smoothing is concave and increasing, is an underestimator, and dominates a simple “shift smoothing”.

This is joint work with Luze Xu and Daphne Skipper.

Biography. Jon is the G. Lawton and Louise G. Johnson Professor of Engineering and also Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an Affiliate of CHEPS (The Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety), MIDAS (Michigan Institute for Data Science), MCAIM (Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics), and of MICDE (Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering).

Currently, Jon is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Mathematical Programming (Series A), Editorial Board Member of the journal Optimization and Engineering, and Editorial Board Member of the journal Discrete Applied Mathematics. Jon is a Permanent Member of DIMACS, and a Full Member of the COIN-OR Foundation.