As the part of our distinguished seminar series, Prof. Roger J-B Wets will give a talk titled “Applying Variational Analysis Technology to the Fusion of Hard and Soft Information in Statistical Estimation” on March 9, 2015.
Roger J-B Wets received his Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences in 1965 from the University of California at Berkeley and is now a Distinguished Research Professor of Mathematics at the Univeristy of California, Davis with which he has been associated since 1984. His main research interests have been stochastic optimization and variational analysis. During the last decade his research has been focused on equilibrium problems in a stochastic environment, and on nonparametric estimation, in particular in the fusion of hard and soft information. He has published about 200 technical articles, mostly in pure and applied mathematical journals, but also in journals dealing with probability, statistics, economics and ecology. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982-83, an Erskine Fellowship in 1991. In 1992, he was made a foreign member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1994, he was awarded the (SIAM-MPS) G.B. Dantzig Prize in Mathematical Programming for his contributions to stochastic programming and variational convergence. In 1998, he received the Lanchester Prize (INFORMS) for the book ‘Variational Analysis’ that he co-authored with R.T. Rockafellar which appeared in Springer’s ‘Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften.’ In 2002, he was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Vienna for his contributions to mathematics, statistics and economics and in 2004, he was recognized as a pioneer in the field of stochastic optimization at the 10th International Conference on Stochastic Programming.
You can find the announcement of the seminar below: