- This event has passed.
LANS Seminar
Seminar Title: Recent advances in constructing convex relaxations for global optimization
Speaker: Kamil Khan, Associate Professor, Chemical Engineering, McMaster University, Canada
Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026
Time: 2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Virtual)
Location: Hybrid, Bldg. 240, Conference Room 4301
Host: Paul Hovland
Description: Global optimization problems arise in various engineering applications such as modeling thermodynamic equilibria. In state-of-the-art deterministic methods for global minimization (as implemented in the solvers BARON, ANTIGONE, MAiNGO, and EAGO.jl), a problem is solved to ε-optimality in finite time by evaluating upper and lower bounds on the unknown globally optimal value, and then successively refining these bounds. Lower bounds here are typically computed by constructing and minimizing an appropriate convex relaxation. Intuitively, for these lower bounds to be useful in global optimization, the supplied convex relaxations must be accurate and tight, and they must be constructed both automatically and cheaply. This presentation summarizes established approaches for generating useful convex relaxations of well-behaved functions, and introduces our recent advances in handling implicit functions and solutions of parametric ODEs, incorporating derivative-free analysis techniques, and making effective use of gradient/subgradient information.
Bio: Kamil Khan is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University in Canada. His research focuses on developing numerical methods to address challenging optimization problems. Kamil received his B.S.E. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from MIT, both in chemical engineering. He was a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of the Argonne National Laboratory. His doctoral work was awarded the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ W. David Smith, Jr. Graduate Student Paper Award.
Please note that the meeting URL for this event can be seen on the cels-seminars website which requires an Argonne login.