CSE591 (Fall 2008) Optimization Algorithms with Engineering Applications
Professor Guoliang (Larry) Xue
Lectures: MW 03:30pm--04:45pm, BYAC190
Office Hours: MW 04:45pm--06:00pm, BYAC442
Class Website: https://my.asu.edu


Overview:

This course is designed for graduate students in Computer Science and Engineering, as well as graduate students in other Engineering fields. During your dissertation or thesis research, most of you will be faced with some non-trivial optimization problems. The following are some examples. In video-delivery, you may need to find the fastest way to deliver the video. In QoS routing, you may need to find a path subject to several QoS constraints, or you may need to find a multicast tree subject to several QoS constraints. In cross-layer design of wireless networks, you may need to find a good combination of channel assignment, transmission scheduling, and routing, in order to meet some communication requirement while satisfying fairness and/or interference constraints. In sensor networks, you may need to maximize lifetime, guarantee coverage, maintain a good topology, etc. In VLSI design, you may need to find the shortest circuit interconnecting a set of pins while satisfying some constraints. In bioinformatics, you may need to find biclusters or network motifs. In multimedia services, you may need to deliver some on-demand video files of a given quality to the clients within a specified delay bound. In survivable design, you may need to design a system that can provide guaranteed recovery while using not too much resource. The list goes on and on. If you have been trying to solve the optimization problems in your research and wish to have more powerful techniques, this may be the course you need to take.

In the first part of this course, we will study some fundamental theory and algorithms/techniques of optimization (linear, nonlinear, convex, as well as combinatorial). These include

The materials for this part will be Part 1 and Part 3 of Boyd and Vandenberghe, plus some materials from Bazaraa+Sherali+Shetty. In the second part of this course, we will study applications of these methods in engineering applications, plus some approximation schemes the instructor has developed for hard problems. The materials will come from research papers from the literature (Science, Nature, SIAM Journal on Optimization, IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Infocom, ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc). The problems include (tentatively) the following.

Grading:

There is NO formal exam (midterm, final). Your grade will be based on the following

References: