Professor Aharon Ben-Tal

General Information

Prof. Ben-Tal's first degree, at Tel-Aviv University, was a double major in Statistics and Economics. His second degree, also at Tel-Aviv University was in Statistics, specializing in Operations Research. He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University, U.S.A. After two years of postdoctoral work at McGill University (Montreal) and University of Texas (Austin), he joined the Technion's Computer Science Faculty in 1975, moving in 1981 to the Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty, where he served as Dean from 1989-92. Prof. Ben-Tal has held visiting positions at the University of Copenhagen, University of Michigan, Delft University of Technology.Princeton, MIT and other North American universities.

Aharon Ben-Tal is a Professor of Operations Research and Head of the MINERVA Optimization Center at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and holder of the Dresner Chair. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1973.He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, University of Copenhagen, Delft University of Technology, MIT and CWI Amsterdam. His interests are in Continuous Optimization, particularly nonsmooth and large-scale problems, conic and robust optimization, as well as convex and nonsmooth analysis. Recently the focus of his research is on optimization problems affected by uncertainty. In the last 15 years, he has devoted much effort to engineering applications of optimization methodology and computational schemes. Some of the algorithms developed in the MINERVA Optimization Center are in use by Industry ( Medical Imaging, Aerospace). He has published more than 120 papers in professional journals and co-authored three books: Optimality in Nonlinear Programming: A Feasible Direction Approach (Wiley-Interscience, 1981) Lectures on Modern Convex Optimization: Analysis, Algorithms and Engineering Applications (SIAM-MPS series on optimization, 2001) and Robust Optimization (Princeton University press,2009). Prof. Ben-Tal was Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion (1989-1992). He served as a council member of the Mathematical Programming Society (1994-1997). He was Area Editor (Continuous Optimization) of Math. of Operations Research (1993-1999), member of the Editorial Board of SIAM J. Optimization, J. Convex Analysis, OR Letters, Mathematical Programming, Management Science, Math. Modeling and Numerical Analysis, European J. of Operations Research and Computational Management Science. Beginning January 2012 he will be Area Editor (Optimization) for Operations Research.

He gave numerous plenary and keynote lectures in international conferences.

In 2007 Professor Ben-Tal was awarded the EURO Gold Medal - the highest distinction of Operations Research within Europe.
In 2009 he was named Fellow of INFORMS.
In 2010 he was awarded the status of Distinguished Scientist by CWI (center for mathematics and computer science, The Netherlands).
In 2011 he received the IBM Faculty Award.

Edit page

Research Summary

Prof. Ben-Tal's research work is mainly in the area of nonlinear optimization. He published over 100 papers and 3 books. His theoretical work is concerned with extremum principles for problems in a general setting, with regard to the underlying decision space, and the underlying smoothness of the functionals. He was among the first to develop a comprehensive theory of second-order optimality conditions for nondifferential problems.

Prof. Ben-Tal is also involved in research in stochastic mathematical programming. He introduced the concept of entropic-penalty for problems with randomness in the constraints, and developed a duality theory which established a link between stochastic programming and the Expected Utility principle in economics. Recently he developed, together with Prof. A. Nemirovski, the Robust Optimization methodology. The focus of Prof. Ben-Tal's work in recent years is in computational methods for solving large-scale continuous optimization problems. The algorithms he develops are used in designing optimally complex engineering structures, water distribution networks, and techniques for medical image reconstruction. The above projects are carried out in the MINERVA Optimization Center, a 1 million euro endowed research center headed by Prof. Ben-Tal.

Prof. Ben-Tal was a member of the International Council of the Mathematical Programming Society. He served as Area Editor of the journal Mathematics of Operations Research, and Associae Editor for Math. Programming and SIAM Optimization.He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Management Scsience Convex Analysis,J.Optimization and Engineering and European J. of Oprations Research.. He received Awards of Excellence from the Technion both for research and for teaching. In 2007 Prof. Ben-Tal was awarded the EURO Gold Medal-the highesr distinction for Operations Research within Europe. In 2009 he was awarded the status of INFORMS Fellow.

Edit page

Current Research Projects

Convex analysis, nonsmooth optimization

Robust optimization

Algorithms for large-scale nonlinear programming

Optimal engineering design

Medical Imaging

Edit page

Selected Publications

Ben-Israel, A., Ben-Tal, A. and Zlobec, S. (1981), Optimality in Nonlinear Programming: A Feasible Directions Approach, Wiley-Interscience, New York.
Ben-Tal, A. and Nemirovski, A. (2001), Lectures on Modern Convex Optimization: Analysis, Algorithms; Engineering Applications. SIAM-MPS Series in Optimization.
Ben-Tal, A. and Zowe, J. (1981), A unified approach of optimality conditions for extremum problems in topological vector spaces, Mathematical Programming Studies 19, 39--76.
Ben-Tal, A. (1985), The entropic penalty approach to stochastic programming, Mathematics of Operations Research 10, 263--279.
Ben-Tal, A., Borwein, M.M. and Teboulle, M. (1988), A dual approach to multidimensional $L_p$-spectral estimation problems, SIAM J. Control and Optimization 26, 985--996.
Ben-Tal, A. and Bendsoe, M.P. (1993), A new method for optimal truss topology design, SIAM J. Optimization 13 (2).
Ben-Tal, A., Kocvara, M., Nemirovski, A. and Zowe, J. (1999), Free material design via semidefinite programming, the multi-load case with contact conditions, SIAM J. Optimization , 9, 813-832.
Ben-Tal, A. and Nemirovski, A. (2000), Structural design via semidefinite programming, Handbook on Semidefinite Programming, Kluwer, Boston, 443-467.
Ben-Tal, A., El Ghaoui, L., Nemirovski, A. (2009), Robust Optimization, Princeton University Press.

Edit page

Return to the Faculty Members List	Return to the main page

Top of page

http://ie.technion.ac.il Total hits: 950208 Users online: 1 Last updated at 10:05 - Monday Mar,26th, 2012