TILOS Seminar: How to use Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization

Sherief Reda, Professor, Brown University and Principal Research Scientist at Amazon

Combinatorial optimization methods are routinely used in many scientific fields to identify optimal solutions among a large but finite set of possible solutions for problems of interests. Given the recent success of machine learning techniques in classification of natural signals (e.g., voice, image, text), it is natural to ask how machine learning methods can be used to improve the quality of solution or the runtime of combinatorial optimization algorithms? In this talk I will provide a general taxonomy and research directions for the use of machine learning techniques in combinatorial optimization. I will illustrate these directions using a number of case studies from my group’s research, which include (1) improving the quality of results of integer linear programming (ILP) solver using deep metric learning, and (2) using reinforcement learning techniques to optimize the size of graphs arising in digital circuit design.

Sherief Reda is a Full Professor at the School of Engineering and Computer Science Department at Brown University and a Principal Research Scientist at Amazon. He joined Brown University in 2006 after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from University of California, San Diego. He has over 135 research articles in the areas of energy-efficient computing, electronic design automation and combinatorial optimization, as well as several patents. Professor Reda received a number of research acknowledgments and awards, including eight best paper nominations, three best paper awards, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has been a PI or co-PI on more than $21.1M of funded projects from federal agencies and industry corporations. He is a senior member of IEEE.