Recently, Yaxiang YUAN, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was a guest speaker of the SUSTech Lecture series. His lecture, entitled “Big Data and Optimization Methods,” was attended by more than 150 faculty members and students of SUSTech. Qiman SHAO, Head of the Department of Statistics and Data Science (STAT-DS), presided over the event.

Professor Yaxiang YUAN is a member of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the American Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and other societies. He has made outstanding contributions in the fields of nonlinear optimization calculation methods, trust-region methods, quasi-Newton methods, and conjugate gradient methods.

He emphasized the importance of big data to the people in attendance. He noted that big data is a new driving force for economic transformation and development. He then went into further details on data analysis. He also explained the optimization modeling and complexity of big data problems in a simplified way and spoke about multiple optimization methods that are commonly used in data science.

Professor YUAN pointed out that big data is now widely used in all walks of life and encouraged faculty members and students to learn more about big data optimization. After the lecture, he held a question-and-answer session with the guests in attendance.