Shiqian Ma, professor of computational applied mathematics and operations research at Rice University, has won the 2024 INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Prize.
The ICS Prize is an annual award for the best English-language papers that advance the state of the art in the operations research and computer science interface.
Ma and his co-authors received this award for three papers: “Proximal Gradient Method for Nonsmooth Optimization over the Stiefel Manifold” published by SIAM Journal on Optimization, “Nonsmooth Optimization over the Stiefel Manifold and Beyond: Proximal Gradient Method and Recent Variants” published by SIAM Review, and “Stochastic Zeroth-order Riemannian Derivative Estimation and Optimization” published by Mathematics of Operations Research. The first paper also received the 2024 SIAM Review SIGEST Award earlier this year.
This award recognizes Ma’s groundbreaking research in Riemannian optimization, which could influence the quickly advancing landscape of future computing.
"Riemannian optimization is a highly active research area in optimization,” said Ma. “It finds many important real-world applications in machine learning, statistics, signal processing, and computer vision—including but not limited to clustering, blind source separation, recommendation system, phase retrieval, community detection, and homography estimation."
The award was presented at the ICS business meeting during the INFORMS 2024 Annual Meeting in Seattle on Oct. 21.