Professor Dorit Hochbaum Honored with 2024 Khachiyan Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Optimization
Professor Dorit S. Hochbaum of UC Berkeley’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (Berkeley IEOR) has been awarded the 2024 Khachiyan Prize by the INFORMS Optimization Society. This award recognizes her extensive contributions to optimization, including her work on the design and analysis of algorithms and their applications across various domains.
The Khachiyan Prize is presented annually to individuals or teams for lifetime achievements in optimization, acknowledging sustained scholarly impact from nominees active in their fields. Professor Hochbaum’s research spans discrete optimization, network flow techniques, data mining, and image segmentation. Her contributions are noted for their mathematical precision and application to practical problems, such as improving semiconductor manufacturing processes, enhancing clustering methods in machine learning, and analyzing patterns of neuronal activity.
The award citation highlights Professor Hochbaum’s innovative use of combinatorial algorithms in data mining and image segmentation, along with her research in neuroscience. Among her notable achievements are the development of the PseudoFlow algorithm for the maximum flow problem and parametric flow techniques for convex Markov Random Fields. Her recent work addresses challenges in machine learning, including recognizing bias in labeled data and enhancing experimental design methods.
Professor Hochbaum is the author of over 190 research papers published in leading journals, including Operations Research, Management Science, and Theoretical Computer Science. She has served on several editorial boards, including as a department editor for the Optimization and Modeling section of Management Science. Beyond her research, she has mentored numerous Ph.D. students who have contributed significantly to the field.
Her past recognitions include an honorary Doctorate of Sciences from the University of Copenhagen, the 2011 INFORMS Computing Society Prize, and fellowships from both INFORMS and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Professor Hochbaum’s career is marked by a combination of theoretical innovation and practical applications, with ongoing contributions that continue to influence the field of optimization.