Prof. Stephen Boyd Draws Large Crowd at SIST Seminar

Prof. Stephen Boyd, Samsung Professor of Engineering, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, visited the School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University on November 8^th and presented an exciting seminar on Convex Optimization: From Real-Time Embedded to Large-Scale Distributed. Over 100graduated students and faculty members from ShanghaiTech, Southeast University and Shanghai University, enjoyed the high-quality seminar, which stimulated many productive discussions. 

Prof. Boyd’s talk focused on two extremes: real-time embedded convex optimization, and distributed convex optimization. For the first one, code generation can be used to generate extremely efficient and reliable solvers for small problems, which can execute in milliseconds or microseconds, and are ideal for embedding in real-time systems. At the other extreme, Prof. Boyed described methods for large-scale distributed optimization, which coordinate many solvers to solve large problems. Prof. Boyd’s talk is open, humorous, informative, and inspiring. The large crowd at the seminar includes faculty members from as for as Nanjing. In addition, the Audience was also treated with some aspiring insights on how to conduct high-quality research and how to become a real scholar.