Volume 13, Number 7

31 October 2006

Emre Alper Yıldırım Receives INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers



 

The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) awarded a Bilkent IE member, Emre Alper Yıldırım, the Optimization Prize for Young Researchers in 2006. This annual prize is given to an esteemed and promising researcher who is at the beginning of his or her academic or industrial career for the most outstanding paper in optimization that is submitted to and accepted, or published in a refereed professional journal.
The award includes a cash amount of US $1,000 and a citation certificate. Dr. Yıldırım received his B.S. from Bilkent and his Ph.D. from Cornell University (USA). He is now an assistant professor in the Industrial Engineering Department at Bilkent.
Dr. Yıldırım received this award for his paper "On the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of ellipsoids" published in SIAM Journal on Optimization Vol. 17 (2006), pp. 621 - 641. The award committee described the contribution of this publication as presenting a novel polynomial-time algorithm for computing an approximation of the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of the convex hull of a given finite number of ellipsoids.
The paper generalizes previous results on covering a finite set of points by developing an innovative semi-definite programming formulation that leads to the surprising result that the asymptotic complexity of computing the ellipsoid-covering is the same as that for the point-covering, despite the very different topologies of these sets. With a fluid style and clear presentation, the paper also illustrates potential extensions to other input sets and forms a solid foundation for further studies in this area.
Dr. Yıldırım is invited to give a half an hour presentation of his award winning paper at the INFORMS Annual Meeting to be held in Pittsburgh, USA on November 5, 2006.