Caltech Welcomes Professor Chandrasekaran

Venkat Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, arrived at Caltech in early September 2012. His area of research is mathematical optimization. He describes, "Almost anything we wish to do in engineering design is about maximizing objectives subject to certain constraints—trading off different aspects of a system to optimize a few others. For instance, if you work in jet-engine design, you have certain constraints in the amount of material you can use, the weight of these materials, aerodynamic issues, etc. But then you want to be able to design your wings and so on in such a way that you maximize, for example, how fast you are able to go. My specific focus deals with trying to look at optimization problems that (a) are tractable to solve—not all optimization problems are ones that can be efficiently solved on a computer—and (b) arise in the information sciences." [Caltech Release]