- Series
- Other Talks
- Time
- Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- ISyE Executive Classroom
- Speaker
- Adrian Lewis – School of Operations Research and Information, Cornell University
- Organizer
- Annette Rohrs
Concrete optimization problems, while often nonsmooth, are not
pathologically so. The class of "semi-algebraic" sets and functions -
those arising from polynomial inequalities - nicely exemplifies
nonsmoothness in practice. Semi-algebraic sets (and their
generalizations) are common, easy to recognize, and richly structured,
supporting powerful variational properties. In particular I will discuss
a generic property of such sets - partial smoothness - and its relationship
with a proximal algorithm for nonsmooth composite
minimization, a versatile model for practical optimization.