Research areas:
Nonlinear nonconvex optimization, signal processing, numerical linear algebra, mathematical biology, data science, and machine learning. My research is currently supported by NSF Grants
IIS 1741490,
DMS 1840265,
DMS 2229495,
and
CCF 2343610.
News and Announcements:
2025
- May: Congratulations to Jacky Alvarez, whose paper, "Sparse-Data Deep Learning Strategies for Radiographic Non-Destructive Testing," has been accepted for publication in Research in Nondestructive Evaluation. Co-authored with Jacky's collaborators at LLNL: Keith Henderson, Maurice Aufderheide, Brian Gallagher, and Ming Jiang.
- April: Graduate student Yu Lu successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, "Negative Binomial Optimization for Signal Processing, Medical Imaging, and Deep Learning Applications." Many thanks to Yu's dissertation committee: Prof. Erica Rutter,
Prof. Arnold Kim, and
Prof. Changqing Li. Yu will start his position at Meta in June. Congratulations, Dr. Lu!
- April: Graduate student Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, "Constrained Optimization for Regularizing Machine Learning Techniques to Improve Generalizability." Jocelyn is co-advised with Prof. Erica Rutter. Many thanks to Prof. Chrysoula Tsogka, Dr. Omar DeGuchy (LLNL), and Dr. David Slater (MITRE) for serving on her dissertation committee. Jocelyn will start her postdoctoral position at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in June. Congratulations, Dr. Ornelas-Muñoz!
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Sarah Malone, whose paper, "Triple matrix factorization for drug-drug interaction prediction using fused Gromov-Wasserstein distances," has been accepted to the 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Co-authored with Dr. Mohammad Aburidi. Sarah is co-advised with Prof. Shilpa Khatri.
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Yu Lu, whose paper, "Noise model statistics regularization for deep learning biomedical imaging," has been accepted to the 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications.
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Kyle Wright, whose journal paper, "Inverse Eigenvalue Difference Problems for Quantum Dots," has been accepted for publication in Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications. Co-authored with Kyle's co-adsivor, Prof. Boaz Ilan, and collaborator, Prof. Michael Scheibner.
- March: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Kyle Wright, whose paper, "Groundwater Modeling using Gravity-Gradient Cartography," has been accepted to the 2025 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Co-authored with Kyle's co-adsivor, Prof. Boaz Ilan, and collaborator, Prof. Teamrat Ghezzehei.
- March: At IPAM for LatMath 2025. Organizing a panel on "Post-tenure: Now That You Have Tenure, What's Next?". Thanks to panelists,
Prof. Eun Heui Kim,
Prof. Alvina Atkinson, and
Prof. Hector Ceniceros.
A big thank you to conference organizers
Prof. Selenne Bañuelos,
Prof. Mario Bañuelos,
Prof. Juan Meza,
Prof. Cynthia Flores, and
Prof. Anthony Várilly-Alvarado.
- January: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Kyle Wright, whose paper, "Towards motion sensing using asymmetric coupled quantum dots," has been accepted to the 2025 International Conference on Quantum Communications, Networking, and Computing. Co-authored with Kyle's co-adsivor, Prof. Boaz Ilan, and collaborator, Prof. Michael Scheibner.
- January: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, whose paper, "Signal reconstruction for ECG-transmembrane voltage potentials using transformers," has been accepted to the 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging. Co-authored with graduate student Gbocho Terasaki, Dr. Aditya Ranganath (LLNL), and Dr. Omar DeGuchy (LLNL).
2024
- December: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Optimal Transport Based Graph Kernels for Drug Property Prediction" has been accepted to the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.
- December: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose papers, "Deep Unrolled Weighted Low-Rank Approximation for High Dynamic Range Imaging" and "Defending Graph Neural Networks Against Adversarial attacks via Symmetric Matrix Factorization" have been accepted to the 2025 IEEE Artificial Intelligence x Multimedia Conference.
- November: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Irabiel Romero Ruiz, for successfully passing his Quailying Exam! Irabiel is co-advised with Prof. Noemi Petra. Thanks to her committee members, Prof. Boaz Ilan (Applied Math) and Dr. Ignacio Aravena (Livermore).
- November: Graduate student
Mohammed Aburidi successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation,
"Optimization for Robust and Interpretable Learning on Graphs and Images".
Many thanks to Prof. Arnold Kim (Applied Math) and Prof. Shawn Newsam (EECS) for serving on his dissertation committee. Mohammed will start his Postdoctoral Scholar position with the Valley Institute for Sustainability, Technology and Agriculture (VISTA) program with Prof. Joshua Viers in January 2025.
Congratulations, Dr. Aburidi!
- October: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Yu Lu, who will be the recipient of the Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship for Applied Mathematics for the Spring 2025 semeseter!
- October: On the Local Organizing Committee for the First SIAM Northern and Central California Sectional Conference.
- September: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Sarah Malone, for successfullly passing her Qualifying Exam! Sarah is co-advised with Prof. Shilpa Khatri. Thanks to her committee members, Prof. Harish Bhat, Prof. Laura Miller, and Prof. Kevin Mitchell.
- September: The paper, "Quasi-Adam: Accelerating Adam using quasi-Newton approximations," has been accepted to the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2024). Co-authored with Dr. Aditya Ranganath, Ph.D. student Irabiel Romero Ruiz, and Prof. Mukesh Singhal.
- July: Congratulations to Ph.D. student Yu Lu, whose paper, "Negative Binomial Matrix Completion," has been accepted to the 34th IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (IEEE MLSP 2024).
Co-authored with collaborator, Dr. Kevin Bui.
- July: Congratulations to Ph.D. students Sarah Malone and Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Wasserstein-based similarity constrained matrix factorization for drug-drug interaction prediction," has been accepted to the 2024 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems.
- July: Co-PI on an
NSF conference grant
for the First SIAM Northern and Central California Sectional Conference," with Conference Co-Chair
Prof. Noemi Petra (PI) and
Local Organizing Committee members
Prof. Boaz Ilan,
Prof. Changho Kim,
and
Prof. Erica Rutter.
- July: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Irabiel Romero Ruiz, whose paper, "Optimal PMU Placement for State Estimation with Grid Parameter Uncertainty," has been accepted to the 2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Grid Edge Technologies Conference & Exposition. Co-authored with Dr. Ignacio Aravena Solis at LLNL and Irabiel's co-advisor, Prof. Noemi Petra.
- July: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, who is the recipient of Graduate Division's Faculty Mentor Program Fellowship for the 2024-25 academic year. Jocelyn is co-advised with Prof. Erica Rutter.
- July: At the 46th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Orlando, FL, presenting Papers 7934, 6075, and 6571 (see Technical Program here).
- July: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, who received an Outstanding Poster Presentation Award at the Association for Women in Mathematics at the 2024 SIAM Annual Meeting. Jocelyn is co-advised with Prof. Erica Rutter.
- July: Co-Chaired (with Prof. Mario Bañuelos) the 2024 SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education in Spokane, WA. Organized and spoke at the mini-symposium MS3 NSF RTG Programs in Applied Mathematics and Data Science. With
Prof. Andrea Barreiro,
Prof. Jim Nagy, and
Prof. Bruno Jedynak. Thanks to all the committee members, mini-symposium organizers, speakers, and SIAM staff members for a highly engaging conference!
- July: At the 2024 SIAM Annual Meeting in Spokane, WA. Panelist in the PD1 Education Committee Panel Discussion: Industrial Needs for Preparing Students Session.
- July: My term as Chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics at UC Merced begins.
- June: At the 2024 National Workshop on Data Science Education at UC Berkeley. Moderated a panel on Data 6.
- May: At the
2024 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Athens, Greece, presenting the paper
"Sparse signal reconstruction for overdispersed low-photon count biomedical imaging using ℓp total variation,"
co-authored with Ph.D. student, Yu Lu.
- May: At the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Evolving and Adaptive Intelligent Systems in Madrid, Spain, presenting the paper,
"Topological Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Projected Meta Learning", co-authored with Ph.D. student Mohammed Aburidi.
- May: At the 2024 SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra in Paris, France. Thanks to
Prof. Johannes Brust and
Prof. Michael Saunders for the invitation to speak at their mini-symposium
MS10: Numerical Linear Algebra for Optimization and Data Science.
- May: PI on a new NSF grant, "XTRIPODS: Engaging Underserved Communities of Learners in Data Science (EUCLID): A Data-Science Partnership Between University of Chicago and University of California Merced,"
with collaborator extraordinaire Prof. Becca Willett at the University of Chicago.
- April: Congratulations to undergraduate student, Kassandra Zavala Gonzalez, who presented her research at UC Merced's Spring 2024 Opportunities Fellowship Program Project Showcase.
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Optimal transport-based network alignment: Graph classification of small molecule structure-activity relationships in biology", has been accepted to the
46th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.
- April: Congratulations to undergraduate student, Ronald Nap, and Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Contrastive pre-training and multiple instance learning for predicting tumor microsatellite instability", has been accepted to the
46th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, whose paper, "Sparse negative binomial signal recovery for genomic variant prediction in diploid species", has been accepted to the
46th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Co-authored with Jocelyn's co-adsivor, Prof. Erica Rutter and with collaborators Prof. Mario Bañuelos (Fresno State) and Prof. Suzanne Sindi.
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student Kyle Wright, who is the recipient of a 2024-25 GSR fellowship from the F3 R&D GSR Program, funded by the US Dept. of Commerce, Economic Development Administration Build Back Better Regional Challenge. Kyle is co-advised with Prof. Boaz Ilan and will be co-mentored by Prof. Teamrat Ghezzahai. Kyle's project is on "Groundwater Modelling using Gravity Cartography."
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student Irabiel Romero Ruiz, who is the recipient of Graduate Division's 2023-24 Rose R. Ruiz Fellowship. Irabiel is co-advised with Prof. Noemi Petra.
- April: Congratulations to undergraduate student, Ronald Nap, who is the recipient of the UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Outstanding Graduating Senior Award in Applied Mathematics for Spring 2024.
- April: Congratulations to Ph.D. student Jacky Alvarez, whose paper, "Overcoming data sparsity to enable deep learning for radiographic non-destructive testing," has been accepted to the 2024 American Society for Nondestructive Testing Research Symposium: Beyond Boundaries. Co-authored with Jacky's mentors and collaborators at LLNL: Keith Henderson, Maurice Aufderheide, Brian Gallagher, and Ming Jiang.
- March: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Topological adversarial attacks on graph neural networks via projected meta learning", has been accepted to the
2024 IEEE International Conference on Evolving and Adaptive Intelligent Systems.
- March: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, whose paper, "Decoder recovery in coded aperture imaging using convolutional neural networks" was accepted to the 2024 NIST/IEEE Conference on Computational Imaging Using Synthetic Apertures. Co-authored with Jocelyn's co-adsivor, Prof. Erica Rutter.
- March: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Yu Lu, whose paper, "Alternating direction method of multipliers for negative binomial model with the weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation", has been accepted to the
2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. Co-authored with Dr. Kevin Bui.
- February: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Adversarial attack and training for graph convolutional networks using focal loss-projected momentum", has been accepted to the
3rd IEEE International Conference on Computing and Machine Intelligence (ICMI 2024).
- January: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Yu Lu, whose paper, "Sparse signal reconstruction for overdispersed low-photon count biomedical imaging using ℓp total variation", has been accepted to the
2024 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging.
2023
- December: The paper, "Shape-Changing Trust-Region Methods Using Multipoint Symmetric Secant Matrices," has been accepted for publication in Optimization Methods and Software. Co-authored with Prof. Johannes Brust and Prof. Jennifer Erway.
- December: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, for successfullly passing her Qualifying Exam! Jocelyn is co-advised with Prof. Erica Rutter. Thanks to Prof. Chrysoula Tsogka,
Dr. Omar DeGuchy from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Dr. David Slater for MITRE for serving on Jocelyn's committee.
- December: Congratulations to Ph.D. student in Computer Science, Aditya Ranganath, for successfully defending his dissertation, "Optimization for machine learning: Memory-efficient and tractable solutions to large-scale non-convex systems." Aditya is co-advised with Prof. Mukesh Singhal. Thanks to Prof. Harish Bhat and Prof. Meng Tang for serving on Aditya's committee. Congratulations, Dr. Ranganath!
- December: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Enhancing Drug Safety and Efficacy: Wasserstein Distance-Based Graph Kernel for Drug Property Prediction" was accepted to the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Medicine, Health, and Care.
- November: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Kyle Wright, for successfullly passing his Qualifying Exam! Kyle is co-advised with Prof. Boaz Ilan. Thanks to Prof. Michael Scheibner of Physics for serving on his committee.
- November: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, who will receive the SandboxAQ Fellowship in Applied Mathematics for Spring 2024. Jocelyn is co-advised with Prof. Erica Rutter.
- November: At UC Santa Cruz giving the Applied Math Colloquium. Thanks, Associate Dean and Prof. Marcella Gomez, for the invitation!
- October: At ICIP 2023, presenting a poster on
contrastive learning and optimal transport.
- September: At Cat State Long Beach, giving the Mathematics Department Colloquium. Thanks, Prof. Tianni Zhou for the invitation!
- September: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Yu Lu, whose papers, "Overdispersed Photon-Limited Sparse Signal Recovery Using Nonconvex Regularization" and "Sparse Overdispersed Photon-Limited Signal Recovery With Upper and Lower Bounds" were accepted to the 2023 IEEE International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing.
- September: Congratulations to graduate student, Kyle Wright, whose paper, "Parameterized Inverse Eigenvalue Problems for Quantum Sensing" was accepted to the 2023 IEEE International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing. Co-authored with Kyle's co-adsivor, Prof. Boaz Ilan, and collaborator, Prof. Michael Scheibner.
- September: Congratulations to graduate student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, whose paper, "Decoding the Hidden: Direct Image Classification Using Coded Aperture Imaging" was accepted to the 2023 IEEE International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing. Co-authored with Jocelyn's co-adsivor, Prof. Erica Rutter.
- September: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "Optimal Transport and Contrastive-Based Clustering for Annotation-Free Tissue Analysis in Histopathology Images" was accepted to the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications.
- June: Co-PI on a new NSF grant, "AMPS: Scalable Methods for Real-time Estimation of Power Systems under Uncertainty" (PI: Prof. Noemi Petra).
- June: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, whose paper, "CLOT: Contrastive Learning-Driven and Optimal Transport-Based Training for Simultaneous Clustering" has been accepted to 2023 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
- June: Panelist at the 2023 National Workshop on Data Science Education at UC Berkeley.
- May: Presented at 2023 SIAM Conference on Optimization. Thanks to Prof. Johannes Brust and
Prof. Bill Hager for the invitation and for organizing a great mini-symposium!
- May: Poster judge at the AWM Workshop Poster Session at SIAM OP23/ACDA23. Thanks to Prof. Chrysoula Tsogka and Prof. Noemi Petra for organizing a great event!
- May: The paper, "Negative binomial optimization for low-count overdispersed sparse signal reconstruction," has been accepted to EUSIPCO 2023. Co-authored with graduate student, Yu Lu.
- May: Co-PI on a new NSF IUSE: CUE grant,
"Developing inclusive, interdisciplinary undergraduate data science curricula in computing and social science" (PI: Prof. Suzanne Sindi, Co-PI: Prof. Juan Meza). In collaboration with wonderful colleagues at Tuskegee University
and UC Berkeley.
- May: The Applied Math Graduate Program review has successfully closed. Thanks to the Program Review Committee, Prof. Shilpa Khatri and Prof. Boaz Ilan, and to the External Review team,
Prof. Ricardo Cortez,
Prof. Becca Thomases,
and
Prof. Mark Hoefer.
- May: At the 2023 SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems for the MGB-SIAM Early Career Fellowship cohort meeting.
- May: Congratulations to PhD. student, Mohammed Aburidi, for receiving the 2023-24 Graduate Student Opportunity Program Fellowship from UC Merced's Graduate Division!
- May: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Mohammed Aburidi, for successfully passing his Qualifying Exam! Thanks to
Prof. Arnold Kim and
Prof. Shawn Newsam for serving on his committee.
- May: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Yu Lu, for successfully passing his Qualifying Exam!
Thanks to his committee members,
Prof. Arnold Kim,
Prof. Changqing Li,
and
Prof. Erica Rutter.
- May: Co-organizing with the awesome Prof. Changho Kim a Special Session on Scientific Computing (here and here) at the 2023 AMS Western Sectional Meeting at Fresno State.
- May: Congratulations to graduate students Aditya Ranganath, Yu Lu, Irabiel Romero, and Mohammed Aburidi, for being selected as graduate student mentors for the
Lawrence Livermore National Lab-UC Merced Data Science Challenge.
- April: Congratulations to undergraduate student, Ruoxi Zhao, for receiving the Spring 2023 School of Natural Sciences Outstanding Graduating Senior Award in Applied Mathematics!
- April: Poster judge at the Fifth Central Valley Regional SIAM Student Chapter Conference.
- March: Presented at the 2023 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering on "Shape-Changing Trust-Region Methods Using Multipoint Symmetric Secant Matrices."
- February: Presentation judge for the California Alliance for Minority Participation Annual Symposium.
- February: Serving as Chair of the AMS Western Section Program Committee from February 1, 2023 to January 31, 2024.
- January: Serving as Program Director for the SIAM Activity Group on Applied Mathematics Education with UC Merced alums
Prof. Shelley Poole (MSU Denver) as Chair and
Prof. Mario Bañuelos (Fresno State) as Vice-Chair.
2022
- December: Presented at the 21st IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications. Also chaired session on Machine Learning Fundamentals II.
- October: Virtual seminar at the ASU Computational Math Seminar. Thanks to Prof. Malena Español for the invitation to give a talk and meet your students!
- September: Congratulations to undergraduate student Ruoxi Zhao for receiving a fellowship from the Sustainable Horizons Institute's Broader Engagement Program to attend the 2022 SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science in San Diego.
- September: Received the 2021-22 School of Natural Sciences Faculty Award for "Developing or Improving Academic Programs and Tracks". Many thanks to Dean Dumont and to my colleagues for the recognition!
- August: Congratulations to graduate student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, for receiving a fellowship from UC Merced's NSF RTG: Data-Intensive Research and Computing program.
Jocelyn is co-advised with Prof. Erica Rutter.
- August: Congratulations to graduate students, Jacky Alvarez and Kyle Wright, and undergraduate student, Dillon Marquard, for presenting at the SPIE Conference on Appilcations of Machine Learning. See relevant papers here and
here.
- July: Chaired the MS36 Student Days: Student Chapter Presentations Part I session
at the 2022 SIAM Annual Meeting
in Pittsburgh, PA.
- July: Organized the mini-symposium "NSF RTG Programs in Applied Mathematics and Data Science"
(MS2 and
MS7)
at the 2022 SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education. On the conference
Organizing Committee
with UC Merced alums
Prof. Mario Bañuelos (Fresno State) and
Prof. Shelley Poole (MSU Denver).
Also serving on the MGB-SIAM Early Career Fellowship Steering Committee.
- April: The paper, "Synthetic aperture radar image reconstruction using convolutional neural networks," has been accepted for oral presentation at the SPIE Optics + Photonics conference in August in San Diego. Co-authored with graduate student Jacky Alvarez,
Prof. Arnold Kim, and
Prof. Chrysoula Tsogka.
- April: The paper, "Image classification and training with severe data loss," has
been accepted for poster presentation at the SPIE Optics + Photonics conference in August in San Diego. Co-authored with undergraduate student Dillon Marquard and graduate student Kyle Wright.
- April: Congratulations to graduate student, Sarah Downs, for receiving the
Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation Scholarship. Sarah is co-advised with Prof. Shilpa Khatri.
- April: Congratulations to undergraduate student, Cristian Espinosa, for being selected for the Livermore Lab Foundation Fellowship for the 2022-23 academic year. Cristian is mentored by graduate student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz.
- April: Congratulations to graduate student, Kyle Wright, whose communication proposal entitled "Numerical methods for a Schrodinger equation inverse eigenvalue problem" has been accepted for oral presentation at the "15th International Conference on Mathematical and Numerical Aspects of Wave Propagation". Co-authored with Kyle's co-advisor, Prof. Boaz Ilan.
- March: Congratulations to graduate student, Jacky Alvarez, for passing
her Qualifying Exams and advancing to Ph.D. candidacy.
- February: Start of AMS Western Program Committee member 2-year term.
- January: Congratulations to graduate students, Yu Lu and Mohammed Aburidi, for passing their
preliminary exams!
- January: The paper, "Large-Scale Optimization with Linear Equality Constraints using Reduced Compact Representation," has been published in SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing. Co-authored with Johannes Brust, Cosmin Petra, and Michael Saunders.
2021
- December: Congratulations to graduate student, Kyle Wright, for receiving a fellowship from UC Merced's
NSF NRT: Convergence of Nano-engineered Devices for Environmental and Sustainable Applications (CONDESA) program. Kyle is co-advised with Prof. Boaz Ilan.
- July: Co-organizing the Workshop Celebrating Diversity at the SIAM Annual Meeting with Prof. Mario Bañuelos and Prof. Keisha Cook.
- July: Invited mini-symposium talk at the 2021 SIAM Conference on Optimization.
- June: Congratulations to graduate students,
Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz and
Kyle Wright, for being selected as graduate student mentors for the
Lawrence Livermore National Lab-UC Merced Data Science Challenge.
- May: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Jacky Alvarez, for being selected to take part in the 2021 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Data Science Summer Institute!
- May: Graduate student Andrew Lazar successfully defended his M.S. thesis,
"Novel Structural Variant Detection through Relatedness with Negative Binomial Optimization".
Congratulations, Andrew!
- May: The paper, "Second-order trust-region optimization for data-limited inference", has been accepted to the
2021 European Signal Processing Conference. Co-authored with EECS graduate student, Aditya Ranganath, Dr. Omar DeGuchy, and Prof. Mukesh Singhal.
- March: Invited talk at the University of Arizona RTG Research Showcase.
2020
- November: Virtual talk at the 2020 Asilomar Conference on "Detecting novel genomic structural variants through negative binomial optimization."
- September: The webinar series
of the Pacific Math Alliance is in full swing! Learn more about graduate school and REUs in mathematics!
For inquiries, send an email.
- July: Graduate student Ashley De Luna successfully defended her M.S. thesis,
"Classification of Mild Cognitive Impairment under Data Limitations using
Deep Learning Techniques." Congratulations, Ashley!
- July: Organized the SIAM Annual Meeting Workshop Celebrating Diversity. Thanks to co-organizers Prof. Talea Mayo and
Prof. Mario Bañuelos and to the
mini-symposia organizers
Prof. Rebecca Morrison (MS53: Recent Advances in Scientific Computation),
Prof. Sally Ellingson (MS61: Machine Learning and in Silico Drug Discovery),
Prof. Marcella Gomez (MS69: Data-Driven Methods and Models), and
Prof. Ariel Cintron-Arias (MS46: Developing Workforce in 21st Century Applied Mathematics, which was written up in
SIAM News). Graduate student Jacky Alvarez presented in the MS69 session.
- June: The paper, "Deep Convolutional Autoencoders for Deblurring and Denoising Low-Resolution Images", has been accepted to the
2020 International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications. Co-authored with Dr. Omar DeGuchy
and undergraduate student Michael Mendez Jimenez.
- May: The paper, "A Supervised Learning Approach to Detect Signal Variation in Genome Data", has been accepted to the 2020 European Signal Processing Conference. Co-authored with
Prof. Mario Bañuelos,
Dr. Omar DeGuchy,
and
Prof. Suzanne Sindi.
- May: The paper, "Genomic Signal Processing for Variant Detection in Diploid Parent-Child Trios", has been accepted to the 2020 European Signal Processing Conference. Co-authored with
graduate student Melissa Spence,
Prof. Mario Bañuelos,
and
Prof. Suzanne Sindi.
- May: Invited seminar talk at the Mathematics of Data and Decisions at UC Davis.
- April: Congratulations to graduate student, Jacky Alvarez, for receiving the NSF NRT Intelligent Adaptive Systems fellowship for the 2021-2022 academic year.
- April: The paper, "Forward and inverse scattering in synthetic aperture radar using machine learning", has been accepted to the Applications of Machine Learning 2020 conference at the SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications symposium. Co-authored with
Dr. Omar DeGuchy,
graduate student Jacky Alvarez,
Prof. Arnold Kim, and
Prof. Chrysoula Tsogka.
- April: Graduate student Melissa Spence successfully defended her M.S. thesis,
"Genomic Signal Processing for Structural Variant Detection in Related Individuals." Congratulations,
Melissa! (Melissa was co-advised with Prof. Suzanne Sindi.)
- April: Graduate student
Omar DeGuchy
successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation,
"Large-Scale Optimization and Deep Learning Techniques for Data-Driven Signal Processing". Congratulations, Dr. DeGuchy!
(Dr. DeGuchy is now a data scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.)
- March: The paper, "Computationally Efficient Decompositions of Oblique Projection Matrices", has been accepted for publication in the
SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications. Co-authored with
Dr. Johannes Brust and Dr. Cosmin Petra
- March: The book chapter, "Quasi-Newton Optimization Methods for Deep Learning Applications" in "Deep Learning Applications" is now available. Co-authored with Dr. Jacob Rafati.
- March: The paper, "'Image Classification in Synthetic Aperture Radar using Reconstruction from Learned Inverse Scattering", has been accepted to the
2020 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Co-authored with graduate students
Omar DeGuchy
and
Jacky Alvarez.
2019
- November: "Mentoring at the Doctoral Level" panelist at the
Field of Dreams Conference in St. Louis, MO.
- August: The paper, "Large-Scale Quasi-Newton Trust-Region Methods With Low-Dimensional Linear Equality Constraints",
has been accepted for publication in Computational Optimization and Applications. Co-authored with
Dr. Johannes Brust and Dr. Cosmin Petra.
- July: Presented a talk in the
"Mathematical solutions to real world problems involving real data" mini-symposium at the
2019 International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Valencia, Spain. Thanks,
Mili, for the invitation!
- June: The paper, "Trust-region algorithms for training responses: machine learning methods using indefinite Hessian approximations", has been accepted for publication in Optimization Methods and Software. Co-authored with
Prof. Jennifer Erway,
Dr. Joshua Griffin, and Dr. Riadh Omheni.
- May: Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Omar DeGuchy, for being selected to take part in the 2019 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Data Science Summer Institute!
- May: Co-PI on new NSF Research Training Group in the Mathematical Sciences grant, "RTG: Data-Intensive Research and Computing at the University of California, Merced" (PI: Arnold Kim, Co-PI: Francois Blanchette).
- May: The paper, "A dense initialization for limited-memory quasi-Newton methods", has been accepted for publication
in Computational Optimization and Applications. Co-authored with Dr. Johannes Brust,
Prof. Oleg Burdakov, and
Prof. Jennifer Erway.
- April: Two papers were accepted to the 2019 SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications Conference:
"Parameter tuning using asynchronous parallel pattern search in sparse signal reconstruction," co-authored with graduate student
Omar DeGuchy,
and
"Image disambiguation with deep neural networks,"
co-authored with
Omar DeGuchy
and incoming graduate student Alex Ho.
- March: "Computational and Data-Enabled Sciences" Special Session Organizer at the
AMS Spring Central and Western Joint Sectional Meeting
at the University of Hawaii Manoa, March 22-24, 2019.
- March: The paper, "Predicting Novel and Inherited Variants in Parent-Child Trios", co-authored with
graduate student
Melissa Spence,
Prof. Mario Bañuelos,
and
Prof. Suzanne Sindi,
has been accepted to the
2019 International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications in Istanbul, Turkey. Congratulations, everyone!
- March: Serving as a Scholarship Reviewer for the
2019 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference.
- February: Congratulations to
Omar DeGuchy,
whose paper,
"Deep neural networks for low-resolution photon-limited imaging," has been accepted to the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
in Brighton, UK. This work was co-authored with
graduate student Fabian Santiago
and Prof. Mario Bañuelos.
- February: Serving as a Master Facilitator for selecting
F-GAP students and in placing them with Doctoral Facilitators for the
Math Alliance.
2018
- December: A photo of the Merced Math Teacher Circle on the Mathematical
Association of America Twitter feed.
- December: At the 2018 IEEE International Conference
on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine in Madrid, Spain.
- Elected to the Pacific Math Alliance
Director's Board.
- September: Joined the SIAM Workshop Celebrating Diversity (WCD) Working Group. Will chair the Working Group in organizing the WCD sessions and events at the 2020 SIAM Annual Meeting.
- September: The paper, "Improving L-BFGS Initialization For Trust-Region Methods In Deep Learning," co-authored with EECS graduate student Jacob Rafati, has been accpeted to the 17th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications conference (ICMLA 2018) in Orlando, FL for oral presentation.
Congratulations, Jacob!
- July: Oral presentation at the
40th Annual International Conference of the
IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
in Honolulu, HI.
- July: Invited talk in the
"Recent
Advances in Optimization Modeling and Algorithms" mini- symposium at the
2018 SIAM Annual Meeting in Portland, OR.
Thanks, Sven!
Also, check out
Omar DeGuchy's invited talk in the
"Nonlinear
Dynamics and Complex Systems" mini-symposium as part of the
SIAM Workshop
Celebrating Diversity.
- June: At the 2018 Joint PI Meeting: NSF BIGDATA and Big Data Hubs & Spokes in Washington, DC.
- June: At the 2018 Math Teacher Circle Summer Workshop in Washington, DC.
- May: The paper, "Trust-Region Minimization Algorithm for Training Responses (TRMinATR): The Rise of Machine Learning Techniques" has been accepted to the
26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2018).
Co-authored with Jacob Rafati and
Omar DeGuchy.
Congratulations, Jacob and Omar!
- April: Graduate student
Johannes Brust
successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation,
"Large-Scale Quasi-Newton Trust-Region Methods:
High-Accuracy Solvers, Dense Initializations, and Extensions". Congratulations, Dr. Brust!
- April: Congratulations to Omar DeGuchy
for passing his Qualifying Exams and advancing to Ph.D. candidacy.
- April: At ICASSP 2018 in Calgary, Alberta.
- April: The paper, "Structural variant prediction in extended pedigrees through
sparse negative binomial genome signal recovery", has been accepted to
40th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in
Medicine and Biology Society. Co-authored with graduate student
Mario Bañuelos
and Prof. Suzanne Sindi.
- March: The paper,
"Compact representation
of the full Broyden class of quasi-Newton updates",
has been accepted to Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications.
Co-authored with
Prof. Jennifer Erway at Wake Forest
and Omar DeGuchy.
Congratulations, Jennifer and Omar!
- March: Keynote speaker at the
2018 Northern California Undergraduate Math Conference
at Fresno State.
- March: At the Latinx in the Mathematical Sciences Conference 2018
banquet dinner hosted by IPAM, where
Omar DeGuchy
received an award for "Outstanding Poster Presentation". Congratulations, Omar!
- March: Faculty poster judge at the
2018 University of California Leadership Excellence through Advanced Degrees (UC LEADS)
Research and Leadership Symposium
at UC Santa Barbara (UC Merced group photo
here).
- February: Appointed to the
SIAM Career Opportunities Committee
for a one-year term.
- February: Faculty poster judge at the
2018 UC California Alliance for Minority Participation (UC CAMP)
at UC Irvine.
- January: Congratulations to Johannes Brust
for receiving the Spring 2018 Graduate Dean's Dissertation Year Fellowship in Applied Mathematics.
- January: At the
2018 Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego with ARCHIMEDES students
Jessica Linton, Jonathan Sahagun, and Melissa Spence, and graduate student
Omar DeGuchy.
2017
- December: At the
2017 Optimization Methods and Software Conference in Havana, Cuba.
Graduate student Johannes Brust
gave a presentation on "Dense Initializations for Limited-Memory Quasi-Newton Methods".
- December: At
CAMSAP 2017 in Curacao, Dutch Antilles.
- October: At the Beyond Convexity:
Emerging Challenges in Data Science Workshop at the Casa Matemática Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico.
- September: Selected to serve as a consultant for
MAA Project NExT Fellow
Jay Cummings
(Blue '17 and faculty member at CSU Sacramento). Check out the videos on his website!
- September: Congratulations to Omar DeGuchy,
whose paper "Photon-limited fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy signal recovery with known bounds" has been
accepted to the 2017 IEEE International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing
(CAMSAP). This work is in collaboration with
Dr. Lasith Adhikari and
Prof. Arnold Kim.
- September: Congratulations to Omar DeGuchy
for receiving a travel fellowship to the 2017 SACNAS conference.
- September: SampTA paper on
"Mixture regression as subspace clustering" (with
Daniel Pimentel-Alarcon,
Laura Balzano,
Rob Nowak, and
Rebecca Willett)
now available here.
- August: Graduate student Omar DeGuchy presented
two papers
(Paper 10394-16: Limited memory trust-region methods for sparse relaxation and
Paper 10394-18: Non-convex Shannon entropy for photon-limited imaging)
at SPIE Wavelets and Sparsity XVIII in San Diego, CA.
- August: NSF BIGDATA proposal on
"Parsimonious anomaly detection for sequencing data"
funded. In collaboration with
Prof. Jennifer Erway at Wake Forest and
Prof. Suzanne Sindi.
- July: At MathFest in Chicago, IL with 2016 ARCHIMEDES REU alums
Andrew Fujikawa, Jessica Linton, Jonathan Sahagun, and Katie Sanderson, and co-mentor
Suzanne Sindi.
- July: Appointed to the
AMS-Simons Travel Grants Committee for a three-year term, starting in February, 2018.
- July: At the 2017 SIAM
Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. Co-organized the
Professional Development Evening.
Also check out Becca Willett's plenary talk on "Nonlinear Models for Matrix Completion".
- June: At the Householder Symposium XX at Virginia Tech.
- May: At the 2017 SIOPT Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
Co-organized MS13:
Nonconvex Optimization for Imaging Analysis with
Dr. Lasith Adhikari.
Co-organized MS42:
Recent advances in quasi-Newton methods with Dr. Cosmin Petra.
Presented in MS22:
Recent advances in large-scale nonlinear optimization.
Graduate student Johannes Brust presented
here and
here.
Graduate student Omar DeGuchy presented
here and
here.
- May: At the 2017 International Symposium on
Medical Measurements and Applications (MeMeA) in Rochester, MN with
Suzanne Sindi
and her Ph.D. student Mario Bañuelos.
- March: Graduate student
Lasith Adhikari
successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation,
"Nonconvex sparse recovery methods". Congratulations, Dr. Adhikari!
(Dr. Adhikari is now a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Medicine
at the University of Florida. Check out his new
website!)
- March: Congratulations to the 2016 ARCHIMEDES REU GenOpt Team
(Andrew Fujikawa, Jonathan Sahagun, Katie Sanderson, and Melissa Spence),
whose papers
"Sparse diploid signal recovery for genomic variant detection" and
"Nonconvex regularization for sparse genomic variant detection" have been accepted
to the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications.
This work is in collaboration with graduate students
Mario Bañuelos
and
Lasith Adhikari,
Rubi Almanza, and
Suzanne Sindi.
- March: Congratulations to
Mario Bañuelos
and
Lasith Adhikari,
whose paper, "Biomedical signal recovery: Genomic variant detection in family lineages"
was accepted to the IEEE 5th Portuguese Meeting on Bioengineering (ENBENG).
This work is in collaboration with Rubi Almanza and Suzanne Sindi.
- January: Congratulations to
Lasith Adhikari
and
Johannes Brust
for being selected to receive SIAM Student Travel Awards to attend the
SIAM Conference on Optimization (OP17)
in Vancouver, Canada.
2016
- November: Congratulations to
Lasith Adhikari,
whose Ph.D./M.Sc. Forum proposal, "Non-convex sparse optimization for photon-limited imaging",
has been accepted to the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing (ICASSP).
- November: Recently posted in Linear Algebra and its Applications: "On solving limited-memory quasi-Newton equations",
co-authored with Jennifer Erway.
- November: Congratulations to
Lasith Adhikari
for receiving the Spring 2017 School of Natural Sciences Dean's Distinguished Scholars Fellowship.
- October: At the 2016 International
Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications in Monterey, CA.
- August: Congratulations to graduate student Johannes Brust, whose manuscript, "On solving L-SR1 trust-region subproblems" (co-authored with Jennifer Erway)
has been accepted to Computational Optimization and Applications.
- August: Congratulations to
Lasith Adhikari,
whose paper, "Sparse reconstruction for fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy with Poisson noise"
(co-authored with Arnold Kim), has been accepted to the 2016 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing in Washington, DC.
- August: Organized a mini-symposium on large-scale nonlinear optimization at the
2016 International Conference on Continuous Optimization
in Tokyo, Japan.
- August: Congratulations to Johannes Brust for passing his Qualifying Exams and advancing to Ph.D. candidacy.
- July: Seminar talk at the Pacific Math Alliance Preparing Undergraduates through Mentoring toward PhD's (PUMP) program at Cal State Los Angeles.
- July: Professional Development Evening co-organizer at the 2016 SIAM Annual Meeting. Also co-authored talks by Jennifer Erway and Mario Bañuelos.
- June: Congratulations to
Lasith Adhikari,
whose papers, "Nonconvex sparse Poisson intensity reconstruction for time-dependent
bioluminescence tomography" (co-authored with
Arnold Kim) and
"Trust-region methods for nonconvex sparse recovery optimization"
(co-authored with Jennifer Erway and
Bob Plemmons) were accepted to the
2016 International Symposium on
Information Theory and Its Applications in Monterey, CA.
- June: At the 2016 IEEE Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing in Spain.
- June: At the NSF/NIH-sponsored 2016 Innovation Lab on Interdisciplinary
Approaches to Biomedical Data Science
Challenges of Wearable and/or Ambient Sensors at Lake Arrowhead, CA. (See article
here.)
- April: At the NSF-sponsored Theoretical Foundations of Data Science: Algorithmic, Mathematical, and Statistical Workshop in Arlington, VA.
- February: Congratulations to undergraduate student, Victoria Arias, for receiving a Special Merit Award at the annual CAMP Statewide Research Symposium at UC Irvine.
- January: Applications to the 2016 UC Merced Applied Math summer REU program are now available (click here).
- January: SIAM Minisymposium on Optimization Co-organizer at the 2016 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle, WA.
- January: Appointed to the Professional Development Working Group of SIAM's Education Committee.
2015
- December: Congratulations to undergraduate students, Aramayis Orkusyan (Fresno State) and Joanna Valenzuela (UC Merced URM),
and Lasith Adhikari,
whose paper, ''Analysis of p-norm regularized subproblem minimization for sparse photon-limited image recovery" was accepted to the
2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Shanghai, China.
- December: Congratulations to Lasith Adhikari for co-authoring the paper, "Sparse signal recovery methods for variant detection in next-generation sequencing data" (with
Mario Bañuelos, Rubi Almanza, and
Suzanne Sindi), which was accepted to the
2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Shanghai, China.
- November: Talks at the Systems Information Learning Optimization and Applied and Computational Mathematics seminars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Presentation at the "Mini-Workshop on Optimization" (part of the Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research Workshop Series at UC Merced).
- October: 2015 SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra
"Numerical linear algebra in large-scale optimization"
mini-symposium organizer.
- Fall: Sabbatical at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Host: Rebecca Willett at ECE).
- September: Recently posted in SIMAX: "On Efficiently Computing the Eigenvalues of Limited-Memory Quasi-Newton Matrices",
co-authored with Jennifer Erway.
- July: 2015 ISMP "Large-Scale Nonlinear Optimization" mini-symposium organizer.
Also, speaker at "Algorithms for Large-Scale Nonlinear Optimization".
- May 22: Congratulations to Lasith Adhikari, whose paper,
"p-th power total variation regularization in photon-limited imaging via iterative reweighting," was accepted to EUSIPCO 2015.
- April 29: Congratulations to Lasith Adhikari, whose paper entitled,
"Nonconvex Reconstruction for Low-Dimensional Fluorescence Molecular Tomographic Poisson Observations," (co-authored with Dr. Dianwen Zhu and Prof. Changqing Li) was accepted to the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
- April 22: Poster presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Brisbane, Australia.
- April 15: Congratulations to graduate student Johannes Brust for being accepted to the San Diego Supercomputer Center UC Graduate Student Summer Fellowship program.
- April 8: Congratulations to Lasith Adhikari for receiving the
UC Merced Graduate Student Opportunity Program Fellowship.
- April 4: Invited panelist at the Opportunities in Mathematical Sciences: A Workshop for Emerging Scholars at UC Irvine.
- March 24: Congratulations to Lasith Adhikari for passing his Qualifying Exams and advancing to Ph.D. candidacy.
- February 6: Invited seminar at the CSU Channel Islands LSAMP Program.
- January 14: Congratulations to Lasith Adhikari, whose paper entitled,
"Nonconvex relaxation for Poisson intensity reconstruction," was accepted to the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.
2014
- November 8: Invited panelist on "How to Prepare for Your First Academic Position" at the Field of Dreams Conference in Phoenix, AZ.
- October 1: EXTREEMS-QED: Data-Enabled Science and Computational Analysis Research, Training and Education for Students (DESCARTES) Program applications open (see here).
- August 15: Invited talk at the Workshop on Multiscale Modeling and Computation of Nano-Optics, Michigan State University
- August 8: Campus-wide Undergraduate Research Symposium and end of the ARCHIMEDES Summer REU Program.
- July 24: Invited lecture at the Pacific Math Alliance PUMP: Preparing Undergraduates through Mentoring at Cal Poly Pomona University.
- July 8: SIAM Annual Meeting Mini-symposium MS74: Expeditions in Training, Research, and Education for Mathematics and Statistics through Quantitative Explorations of Data. Organizer: Roummel F. Marcia
- June 9: Start of the ARCHIMEDES Summer REU Program.
- May 9: Congratulations to Math 24 Teaching Assistant, Jane Hyo Jin Lee, for receiving the 2013-14 School of Natural Sciences Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
2013
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