PhD AWARD 2017
The 2017 laureate of the PGMO Thesis Award are:
Vincent Cohen-Addad
From Practice to Theory : Approximation schemes for clustering and network design under the direction of Claire Mathieu
"This thesis contains pathbreaking and practically very important results concerning local search heuristics for clustering (k-means, k-median) and network design (traveling salesman, Steiner tree). It establishes some structural properties under which these local search heuristics perform very well and even yield polynomial time approximation schemes for these problems."
Joon Kwon
Stratégies de descente miroir pour la minimisation du regret et l'approchabilité sous la direction de Rida Laraki & Sylvain Sorin
"The thesis begins with a remarkably clear presentation of the basics of online linear optimization, regret minimization, mirror descent and approachability. The author develops the analysis of the classical problem of prediction with expert advice in which the outcome vector is assumed to be sparse, and design of optimal approachability strategies for the problem of prediction under partial monitoring. The author also shows how a continuous mirror descent motivates a large set of minimization algorithms in discrete time and the thesis ends with an elegant result bounding variations of convex functions."
The jury for the 2017 edition was chaired by Guillaume Carlier and composed of :
Members appointed by the ROADEF
Clarisse Dhaenens, CRIStAL, Université de Lille
Marcel Mongeau, ENAC
Sourour Elloumi, ENSTA
Members appointed by the group MODE of SMAI
Guillaume Carlier, CEREMADE (Président)
Anatoli Juditsky, Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, Grenoble
Jalal Fadili, ENSICAEN
Members appointed by the PGMO Scientific Council
Luce Brotcorne, INRIA Lille
Julien Mairal, INRIA Grenoble
Jérôme Renault, Toulouse School of Economics