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AMSI Optimization Seminar Abstracts

Dr. Asef Nazari Ganjehlou
A Secant Method for Nonsmooth Optimization

Abstract:
The notion of a secant for locally Lipschitz continuous functions is introduced and a new algorithm to locally minimize nonsmooth, nonconvex functions based on secants is developed. We demonstrate that the secants can be used to design an algorithm to find descent directions of locally Lipschitz continuous functions. This algorithm is applied to design a minimization method, called a secant method. It is proved that the secant method generates a sequence converging to Clarke stationary points. Numerical results are presented demonstrating the applicability of the secant method in a wide variety of nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. We also compare the proposed algorithm with the bundle method using numerical results.

Biosketch:
Asef has submitted his PhD thesis on 2nd March 2009 (still waiting for assessment result) in nonsmooth optimization area under supervision of Dr. Adil Bagirov and Dr. Musa Mammadov. The PhD study, which is done at the University of Ballarat, was about designing derivative free algorithms for nonsmooth and global optimization problems. This kind of problems has many applications in real world for example in Data Mining and Clustering. At the moment, he is working as a research associate at the University of South Australia. Under supervision of Prof. Jerzy Filar and Assoc. Prof. John Boland at the School of Mathematics and Statistics since March 2009, he is doing research in optimization and management of renewable energies specially wind farms and investigating the effects of such energies in the electricity market and grid.

Joydeep Dutta

Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, India

Gap Functions and Error Bounds for Vector Variational Inequalities

Vector variational inequalities are motivated from the necessary optimality conditions for smooth vector optimization problems over convex sets. There are several types of vector variational inequalities but in this talk we concentrate on the Stampacchia type weak vector variational inequality. Our main aim is to devise some scalar valued gap functions which lead to constrained and unconstrained reformulations of the vector variational inequality problem. We also use these gap functions to devise error bounds for the Stampacchia type weak vector variational inequality problem.

 

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