ISyE Seminar: “Submodular Order Functions and Assortment Optimization”
Please join us for our next seminar of spring semester in person. This seminar will feature Rajan Udwani from the University of California Berkeley who will discuss submodular order functions and assortment optimization.
3:30 p.m. - Graduate seminar
4:30 p.m. - Reception, coffee and cookies
Rajan Udwani
Assistant Professor
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
University of California Berkeley
About the seminar
Professor Udwani and his colleagues define a new class of set functions that, in addition to being monotone and subadditive, also admit a very limited form of submodularity defined over a permutation of the ground set. The researchers refer to this permutation as a submodular order. They give fast and best possible approximation algorithms for constrained maximization of submodular order functions. Applying this new notion to the problem of assortment optimization, the researchers obtain new and in some cases the first constant factor guarantee for constrained assortment optimization in fundamental choice models. The researchers also show an intriguing connection to the maximization of monotone submodular functions in the streaming model, where they recover best known approximation guarantees as a corollary of their results.
Read a PDF of the paper on ArXiv.
About the speaker
Rajan Udwani is an assistant professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. He holds a bachelor of technology in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and a Ph.D. in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He works on algorithms for optimization under uncertainty with a focus on revenue management and pricing. His work has been recognized by INFORMS junior faculty and student paper awards.