91 - 100 of 157 results for: MS&E

At a time of significant global uncertainty, diplomats are grappling with transnational and cross-cutting challenges that defy easy solution including: the continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by states and non-state groups, the outbreak of internal conflict across the Middle East and in parts of Africa, the most significant flow of refugees since World War II, and a changing climate that is beginning to have impacts on both developed and developing countries. While the traditional tools of statecraft remain relevant, policymakers are looking to harness the power of new technologies to rethink how the U.S. government approaches and responds to these and other long-standing challenges. In this class, student teams will take actual foreign policy challenges and learn how to apply lean startup principles, ("mission model canvas," "customer development," and "agile engineering¿) to discover and validate agency and user needs and to continually build iterative prototypes to test whether they understood the problem and solution. Teams take a hands-on approach requiring close engagement with officials in the U.S. State Department and other civilian agencies. Team applications required at the end of shopping period. Limited enrollment.

Ethical theory, feasibility, and desirability of a social order in which coercion by individuals and government is minimized and people pursue ends on a voluntary basis. Topics: efficacy and ethics; use rights for property; contracts and torts; spontaneous order and free markets; crime and punishment based on restitution; guardian-ward theory for dealing with incompetents; the effects of state action-hypothesis of reverse results; applications to help the needy, armed intervention, victimless crimes, and environmental protection; transition strategies to a voluntary society.

Restricted to Ph.D. students assigned tutorials as part of the MS&E Ph.D. qualifying process. Enrollment optional.

Formulation of standard linear programming models. Theory of polyhedral convex sets, linear inequalities, alternative theorems, and duality. Variants of the simplex method and the state of art interior-point algorithms. Sensitivity analyses, economic interpretations, and primal-dual methods. Relaxations of harder optimization problems and recent convex conic linear programs. Applications include game equilibrium facility location. Prerequisite: MATH 113 or consent of instructor.

Applications, theories, and algorithms for finite-dimensional linear and nonlinear optimization problems with continuous variables. Elements of convex analysis, first- and second-order optimality conditions, sensitivity and duality. Algorithms for unconstrained optimization, and linearly and nonlinearly constrained problems. Modern applications in communication, game theory, auction, and economics. Prerequisites: MATH 113, 115, or equivalent.

Topics include interior-point methods, relaxation methods for nonlinear discrete optimization, sequential quadratic programming methods, optimal control and decomposition methods. Topic chosen in first class; different topics for individuals or groups possible. Individual or team projects. May be repeated for credit.

Over the past decade there has been an explosion in activity in designing new provably efficient fast graph algorithms. Leveraging techniques from disparate areas of computer science and optimization researchers have made great strides on improving upon the best known running times for fundamental optimization problems on graphs, in many cases breaking long-standing barriers to efficient algorithm design. In this course we will survey these results and cover the key algorithmic tools they leverage to achieve these breakthroughs. Possible topics include but are not limited to, spectral graph theory, sparsification, oblivious routing, local partitioning, Laplacian system solving, and maximum flow. Prerequisites: calculus and linear algebra.