Chi Awarded Best Paper at SIAM

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has awarded Yuejie Chi and team the Activity Group on Imaging Sciences Best Paper Prize (SIAG/IS Best Paper Prize) for their paper “Implicit Regularization in Nonconvex Statistical Estimation: Gradient Descent Converges Linearly for Phase Retrieval, Matrix Completion, and Blind Deconvolution.”

The team of authors includes Yuejie Chi, the Sense of Wonder Group Endowed Professor in AI Systems of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Cong Ma (University of Chicago), Kaizheng Wang (Columbia University), and Yuxin Chen (University of Pennsylvania). Their paper uncovers a striking phenomenon in nonconvex optimization. Even in the absence of explicit regularization, gradient descent enforces proper regularization implicitly under various statistical models.

The SIAG/IS is awarded every two years to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper on mathematical and computational aspects of imaging published within the four calendar years preceding the year prior to the award year. The committee recommended that the team receive the award for the deep understanding and analysis of the interaction between optimization algorithms and the geometry of the landscape in which they operate.

Chi focuses her research on the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of data science, machine learning, signal processing and inverse problems, with applications in sensing, imaging and societal systems, broadly defined. Motivated by the challenge of extracting useful information and making reliable decisions from large-scale and high-dimensional data, particularly in sample-starved or resource-starved environments, the problems her group studies are often interdisciplinary in nature, lying at the intersection of statistics, learning, optimization, and sensing.

Connecting the global applied mathematics community for over 70 years, The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics brings together mathematicians, engineering, and scientists around the world through various committees, and volunteer and networking opportunities.

Chi will accept the award during the 2024 conference in Atlanta, Georgia May 28 – 31, 2024.