Last week I attended Zeyuan Allen-Zhu dissertation defense on the topic of Novel Frameworks for Auctions and Optimization.
The abstract of the talk follows.
Abstract: This thesis introduces novel frameworks for modeling uncertainty in auctions, and for understanding first-order methods in optimization. The former provides robust analysis to alternative specifications of preferences and information structures in Vickrey auctions, and the latter enables us to break 20-year barriers on the running time used for solving positive linear programs.
Zeyuan Allen-Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in Comptuer Science (supervised by Prof. Jon Kelner and Prof. Silvio Micali) with an amazing record of publications. His defense talk on the topics of Novel Frameworks for Auctions and Optimization was quite comprehensive and easy to follow.
Prof. Jon Kelner and Prof. Silvio Micali promised a cake after the defense. The audience had to leave for the private session with the candidate. I got an update from Zeyuan that he passed!
Looking forward to Zeyuan published dissertation.
