
Incoming Assistant Professosr
Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Email: symei@ust.hk
Office: Clear Water bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
About Me
I will be joining the Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics (IEDA) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as an Assistant Professor in this fall. I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Minnesota, where I was fortunate to be advised by Professor Zhaosong Lu. I completed my undergraduate studies in the School of the Gifted Young at University of Science and Technology of China and obtained a B.S. degree in Mathematics in 2020.
I am actively looking for self-motivated Ph.D. students with a strong background in mathematics. If you are interested, please feel free to contact me with your CV and a copy of your transcript. For more information, please refer to the Ph.D. programs in IEDA.
Education
University of Minnesota
Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering, Sept. 2020 - May 2025
M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering, Sept. 2020 - Apr. 2023
University of Science and Technology of China
B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Sept. 2016 - Jun. 2020
Research Interests
- Algorithm design and analysis for bilevel, minimax, stochastic, distributed, and online optimization
- Applications for data science, AI/machine learning, healthcare, and decision-making under uncertainty
Honors
INFORMS Optimization Society 2024 Student Paper Prize Honorable Mention
for the paper "Accelerated first-order methods for convex optimization with locally Lipschitz continuous gradient" coauthored with Prof. Zhaosong Lu.
Research Papers
- Variance-reduced first-order methods for deterministically constrained stochastic nonconvex optimization with strong convergence guarantees (with Z. Lu and Y. Xiao), submitted.
- A first-order method for nonconvex-strongly-concave constrained minimax optimization (with Z. Lu), submitted.
- Solving bilevel optimization via sequential minimax optimization (with Z. Lu), submitted.
- Primal-dual extrapolation methods for monotone inclusions under local Lipschitz continuity (with Z. Lu), to appear in Mathematics of Operations Research, 2024.
- A first-order augmented Lagrangian method for constrained minimax optimization (with Z. Lu), Mathematical Programming, 1-42, 2024.
- First-order penalty methods for bilevel optimization (with Z. Lu), SIAM Journal on Optimization, 34(2), 1937-1969, 2024.
- Accelerated first-order methods for convex optimization with locally Lipschitz continuous gradient (with Z. Lu), SIAM Journal on Optimization, 33(3): 2275-2310, 2023.
Teaching
- IE 2021: Engineering Economics, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2021, 2022, 2023.
- IE 3011: Optimization I, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2021.
- IE 5531/MATH 5711: Engineering Optimization I, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2024.
- IE 5545: Decision Analysis, Teaching Assistant, Spring 2022.
- IE 5561: Analytics and Data-Driven Decision Making, Teaching Assistant, Spring 2022, 2023, 2024.
- IE 8564: Optimization for Machine Learning, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2022, 2024.