Professor Kaizheng Wang and his coauthors Cong Ma, Yuejie Chi, and Yuxin Chen have won the SIAM Activity Group on Imaging Science 2024 Best Paper Prize for their paper "Implicit Regularization in Nonconvex Statistical Estimation: Gradient Descent Converges Linearly for Phase Retrieval, Matrix Completion and Blind Deconvolution," published in 2020 in Foundations of Computational Mathematics. A shorter version of their work previously appeared in the Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning in 2018.
At the 2023 Winter Simulation Conference in San Antonio, Texas, a paper by former IEOR PhD student Yuanlu Bai, Professor Ton Dieker, and Professor Henry Lam earned the Best Contributed Theoretical Paper Award. Their work is titled "Curse of Dimensionality in Rare-Event Simulation." Yuanlu defended her PhD thesis, "Rare-Event Estimation and Calibration for Large-Scale Stochastic Simulation Models," in the Spring 2023 semester with Professor Lam as her advisor.
