Graduiertenkolleg Mathematical Complexity Reduction

The official phase of the graduate school "Mathematical Complexity Reduction" started in April 2017. We organized a Kick-Off event at the "Festung Mark" in June with several speakers involved.

New faces and positions

After finishing his Master's Thesis about optimal experimental design applied to haematopoiesis (with a real clinical study), Patrick Lilienthal joined our group in February as a PhD student. He continues his previous work thematically, but will also develop software tools in the area of compartment models for human blood dynamics.

Another former Master student (Thesis A second derivative sequential quadratic programming method) who joined our team is Do Duc Le. He started his PhD journey in June with research in interests in the area of Mathematical Optimization for Traffic Control.

In September, Dr. Emily Speakman and Dr. Maximilian Merkert started to work in our group, both are associated with the Research Training Group MathCoRe. Emily did her PhD with Jon Lee on Geometric comparison of implementation strategies for trilinear monomials in spatial branch and bound at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, while Maximilian had Alexander Martin as supervisor for his Phd thesis on Solving Mixed-Integer Linear and Nonlinear Network Optimization Problems by Local Reformulations and Relaxations at the University of Erlangen.

The newest member of 2017 is at the same time the sweetest one: Selma Maria, Sebastians second daughter was born in December.

Completed Theses

Dr. Jonas Rauch has finished his PhD thesis.

Jonas's thesis The Airline Pricing Problem advances the state-of-the-art in Revenue Management. He analyzed pricing for a general class of stochastic customer choice models and in combination with dynamic inventory control, with the goal of numerically solving the resulting pricing optimization problem.

Besides the above mentioned Master's theses of Patrick Lilienthal and Do Duc Le, the year 2017 saw the successful completion of the Master's Thesis of Anna Thünen (Mixed-integer PDE Constrained Optimization).

Quedlinburg retreat

Events

Last year, our working group even went on two MATHOPT retreats. In March, the whole group spent almost 3 days in Mieste, which is about 60 km northwest of Magdeburg. There, we gathered for intensive scientific exchange about different areas in Optimization and Control, but we also enjoyed the excellent equipped seminar hotel by watching Bundesliga and having long board game evenings. Our second retreat led us in November to the lovely Harz town Quedlinburg which is also UNESCO world heritage. Different to the first excursion, there we worked in subgroups on chosen projects, such as Machine Learning Algorithms for the Discrimination of lung disease patients and healthy subjects. We had also a good time in exploring the city's castle, walking guided through the historic town and eating at the famous cheesecake cafe.

Conferences and Publications

In 2017 the members of the MATHOPT group joined several conferences and presented new research results. The conferences with its participating group members and their presentation titles are listed below.

SIAM Conference on Optimization in Vancouver, May 22-25: Felix held the talk Towards Dual Control for Acute Myeloid Leukemia, Tobias presented An Online Experimental Design Approach for Fast Detection of Extrasystoles, while both Sebastian and Clemens gave presentations about Mixed-Integer Optimal Control methods and algorithms.

Workshop on Clinical Pharmacology of Anticancer Drugs, Madrid, September 19-20: Felix presented his poster about Prediction of different treatment schedules with a semi-mechanistic leukocytes model covering secondary effects of cytarabine in acute myeloid leukemia

Computing in Cardiology, Rennes, September 24-27: Clemens presented his paper on The Influence of Right Ventricular Afterload in Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy: A CircAdapt Study.