Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Andrés Gómez.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has recognized Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Andrés Gómez with a $450,000 Young Investigator Award. Gómez’s research project will focus on mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLPs) — an area of optimization that addresses nonlinear problems with continuous and integer variables.
An expert in the optimization field, Gómez joined the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2019 with a focus on developing new theories and tools for challenging optimization problems, particularly in finance, machine learning and statistics.
MINLPs are problems that arise across disciplines, such as machine learning or in control, where nonlinear terms are required to capture complicated dynamics and smoothness considerations, while discrete variables are used to model obstacle avoidance and different states of hybrid vehicles. In logistics, nonlinearities arise when enforcing robustness against uncertainty, while discrete variables capture fixed costs and logical constraints.
Gómez’s latest research aims to develop novel ways to exploit convex relaxations for the exact solution of MINLPs. The work seeks to substantially improve algorithms for MINLP problems and open up new avenues for research.
Gómez received his B.S. in Mathematics and B.S. in Computer Science from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). He then obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to joining USC, Gómez worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
In 2023, Gómez and his collaborators received a $700,000 AFOSR grant to establish state-of-the-art GPU Clusters within the Epstein Department.
Gómez has received numerous honors, including a 2022 National Science Foundation Grant of almost $150,000 for new computational tools that will pave the way for improved AI-human collaboration. He was named a 2023 finalist in the INFORMS Junior Faculty Information Group Paper Competition, and he was an awardee of the Google Research Scholar Program in 2022.
Published on April 18th, 2024
Last updated on April 18th, 2024
