• Fall, 2018: Katya Scheinberg, Hector Munoz-Avila, and several other Lehigh faculty members received an NSF grant from the TRIPODS+X program to hold several high profile workshops at Lehigh on topics related to the applications of machine learning in various domains.
• November 5, 2018: Frank E. Curtis has been awarded the INFORMS Computing Society Prize along with James V. Burke (University of Washington), Adrian S. Lewis (Cornell University), and Michael L. Overton (New York University) for their work on gradient sampling methods for nonsmooth optimization.
• Fall Semester, 2018: Our PIs are on the move! Han Liu has started a new position at Northwestern University and Francesco Orabona has started a new position at Boston University. Congratulations to them both!
• September 1, 2018: Welcome Albert Berahas, who is joining the institute and Lehigh as a postdoctoral researcher. Albert completed his thesis on “Methods for Large Scale Nonlinear and Stochastic Optimization” at Northwestern University, where he was advised by Jorge Nocedal.
• September 1, 2018: Courtney Paquette has finished her postdoctoral studies and has moved on to take a position as an NSF postdoc at the University of Waterloo. Congratulations, Courtney!
• August 18, 2018: The DIMACS/TRIPODS/MOPTA conference and summer school were a great success!
• August 13-17, 2018: Check out the upcoming DIMACS/TRIPODS/MOPTA conference. Institute faculty members are offering a summer school before the conference on August 10-12, 2018, covering topics from python + tensorflow, online learning, and algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning.
• July 13-15, 2018: Katya Scheinberg is co-organizing a workshop on “Modern Trends in Nonconvex Optimization for Machine Learning” at ICML 2018; see the workshop website for more information.
• January 8-12, 2018: Katya Scheinberg is chair of the organizing committee for the U.S.-Mexico Workshop on Optimization and its Applications; see the workshop website for more information.
• January 1, 2018: Welcome Courtney Paquette, who is joining the institute and Lehigh. Courtney completed her thesis on “Structure and complexity in non-convex and nonsmooth optimization” at the University of Washington, where she was advised by D. Drusvyatskiy (co-PI on another NSF Tripods Institute).
• January 1, 2018: Congrats to Lehigh faculty members Katya Scheinberg, Frank E. Curtis, and Martin Takac, along with Han Liu (Northwestern) and Francesco Orabona (Stony Brook) for establishing the institute!
  See press coverage by NSF, Lehigh, and Stony Brook.