Dorit S. Hochbaum is a full professor at UC Berkeley. She is a professor of Business Administration and of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR). Professor Hochbaum holds a Ph.D from the Wharton school of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining UC Berkeley in 1981, Profeesor Hochbaum held a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon university's GSIA. Her research interests are in areas of data mining, image segmentation, supply chain management, efficient utilization of resources, computer algorithms and discrete optimization. She did work on locations of plants and bank accounts; on movement of robots; on routing and distribution problems; on feasibility of VLSI designs; on distribution of data bases on computer networks; on clustering problems and on layout and scheduling problems among others. She has contributed to the analysis of heuristics and approximation algorithms in the worst case, and on the average, and to the complexity analysis of algorithms in general, and nonlinear optimization algorithms in particular. Her recent applications work is on problems related to the semiconductor industry in layout, scheduling and testing, in production planning and supply chain streamlining for high tech industries and in logistics and planning problems in various industries. Recent theoretical work focuses on particularly efficient techniques using network flow for data mining and image segmentation and for inverse problems, with applications varying from medical prognosis, error correction, medical imaging, nuclear threat detection, financial risk assessment and prediction, to group rankings and decision problems.
Professor Hochbaum served as the chair of the Manufacturing and Information Technology group at the Haas School of Business. She is the founder and director of the UC Berkeley Supply Chain Initiative. She is the founder and co-director of the RIOT project.
Professor Hochbaum is the author of over 130 papers that appeared in the Operations Research, Management Science and Theoretical Computer Science literature. She serves as department editor for Management Science department of Optimization and Modeling, on the editorial board of Networks and on the advisory board of Algorithms and Operations Research. She served in the past on the editorial boards of Operations Research and Operations Research Letters.
Professor Hochbaum was named in 2004 as honorary doctorate of Sciences of the University of Copenhagen, for her work on approximation algorithms. The title was conferred, at an annual event at the University, in the presence of the Queen of Denmark. In 2005 Professor Hochbaum was conferred the title of INFORMS fellow. She was recently awarded an NSF grant on novel techniques for data mining, and an NSF and Homeland Security award on detection of nuclear threats (DONUTs).