Two Illinois Tech Ph.D. researchers from the nonlinear algebra and statistics research group present at international conferences this academic year:

Ivan Gvozdanović presented a talk titled “Actor-Critic Sampler for Goodness of Fit Testing” at the 2024 INFORMS annual meeting in Seattle in October. INFORMS, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, is the largest professional association for the decision and data sciences.

Miles Bakenhus will present a talk titled “A Heuristic Augmentation Algorithm for Discrete Total-Variation Problems” at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle on January 11. Abstract: “We present a randomized algorithm for sampling Graver moves for a discrete 2-dimensional total-variation regularization problem. This problem can be framed as a graphically constrained integer optimization problem after linearization of the total-variation terms in the objective. The Graver basis for the feasible set corresponds to all connected subgraphs on the graph representing the constraints. Our algorithm samples connected subgraphs heuristically, using decision variable weights obtained from the finite differences of the non-linear objective, and generates moves for an augmentation algorithm from these subgraphs. We compare experimental results for our algorithm to CPLEX and consider potential extensions and generalizations of our algorithm to other problems.”