*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Guest Lecturer:
Dr. Yuri Nesterov
Catholic University at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Presentation Title: Primal-dual interior-point methods with asymmetric barriers
Abstract:
Very often, in the standard optimization problem with general cone constraints, the natural self-concordant barriers for primal and dual cones are not self-conjugate. Geometric programming and the power cones provide us with the most important examples. This primal-dual asymmetry destroys the good properties of the primal-dual barrier function. As a result, the standard machinery of the long-step infeasible-start primal-dual methods does not work.
In this talk, we show that even in the asymmetric case, the interior-point methods remain a powerful computational tool. We discuss several potential-reduction and path following primal-dual schemes. We show that some of them can be implemented in a matrix-free way. This opens a possibility for a direct competition of these polynomial-time methods with recently revived fast gradient schemes, which are applicable to very large optimization problems.