Welcome to my website. My name is Albert S. Berahas and I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan.
My research focuses on designing, developing, analyzing and implementing algorithms for solving large scale nonlinear optimization problems. Such problems are ubiquitous, and arise in a plethora of areas such as engineering design, economics, transportation, robotics, machine learning and statistics. Specifically, I am interested in and have explored several sub-fields of nonlinear optimization such as: (i) general nonlinear optimization algorithms, (ii) optimization algorithms for machine learning, (iii) constrained optimization, (iv) stochastic optimization, (v) derivative-free optimization, and (vi) decentralized optimization. I am affiliated with the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), the Michigan Institute of Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE), and the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics (MCAIM).
Email: [email protected], [email protected]
Office: 2783 IOE Building, 1205 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (map)
Quick Links: Full CV, Bio, Google Scholar, arxiv, LinkedIn
Announcements
I am always looking for outstanding and highly motivated PhD students and Postdoctoral Research Fellows to join my team. If you are interested, please send me an email with your CV, and apply to our PhD program.
News
- May 2025: Our paper “A Flexible Gradient Tracking Algorithmic Framework for Decentralized Optimization” (joint work with Raghu Bollapragada and Shagun Gupta) has been accepted for publication in Computational Optimization and Applications
- April 2025: Delighted to receive a Digital Accessibility Grant from Michigan Engineering
- April 2025: Elected to the 2025 IISE Operations Research Division Board
- March 2025: Jiahao Shi successfully defended his PhD! Congratulations, Jiahao!!! Jiahao will join Amazon in Seattle, WA in May 2025.
- March 2025: Presented in the Industrial Engineering Seminar at Arizona State University
- March 2025: I will serve on the Computational Optimization and Applications journal editorial board
- March 2025: Hosted OPTIMAIZE DAY WINTER 2025 in collaboration with the Detroit Educational Takeover
- March 2025: New Paper “Optimistic Noise-Aware Sequential Quadratic Programming for Equality Constrained Optimization with Rank-Deficient” (joint work with Jiahao Shi and Baoyu Zhou)
- March 2025: Jiahao Shi won the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement. Congratulations, Jiahao!!
- February 2025: Wanping Dong will intern at Argonne National Lab this summer. Congratulations, Wanping!
- February 2025: Presented in the ISE Graduate Seminar Series at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- January 2025: Our paper “A Sequential Quadratic Programming Method with High Probability Complexity Bounds for Nonlinear Equality Constrained Stochastic Optimization” (joint work with Miaolan Xie and Baoyu Zhou) has been accepted for publication in the SIAM Journal on Optimization
- January 2025: Honored to be awarded the 2022 Charles Broyden Best Paper Prize by the Optimization Methods and Software journal for our paper “Quasi-Newton Methods for Machine Learning: Forget the Past, Just Sample“ (joint work with Majid Jahani, Peter Richtárik and Martin Takáč) (article)
- January 2025: Our paper “Collaborative and distributed bayesian optimization via consensus” (joint work with Xubo Yue, Yang Liu, Raed Al Kontar and Blake N. Johnson) has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
- December 2024: Our paper “Scalable Accelerated Materials Discovery of Sustainable Polysaccharide-Based Hydrogels by Autonomous Experimentation and Collaborative Learning” (joint work with Yang Liu, Xubo Yue, Junru Zhang, Zhenghao Zhai, Ali Moammeri, Kevin J. Edgar, Raed Al Kontar and Blake N. Johnson) has been accepted for publication in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
- November 2024: Our paper “Adaptive Consensus: A Network Pruning Approach for Decentralized Optimization” (joint work with Raghu Bollapragada and Suhail Shah) has been accepted for publication in the SIAM Journal on Optimization
- November 2024: New Paper “Exploiting Negative Curvature in Conjunction with Adaptive Sampling: Theoretical Results and a Practical Algorithm” (joint work with Raghu Bollapragada and Wanping Dong)
- November 2024: Hosted OPTIMAIZE DAY FALL 2024 in collaboration with the Detroit Educational Takeover
- October 2024: Our paper “Balancing Communication and Computation in Distributed Optimization” (joint work with Raghu Bollapragada and Shagun Gupta) has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications
- October 2024: Honored to be awarded the Moving Spirit Award for Forums
- October 2024: Presented at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA; chaired 4 sessions; served on 3 award committees; co-organized the INFORMS JFIG Luncheon
- September 2024: Co-organized the 2024 IOE Undergraduate Research Symposium
- September 2024: Hosted Francisco Jara Moroni (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile) as a research visitor in the IOE department
- September 2024: Presented in the ORIE Seminar Series at the University of Texas in Austin
- August 2024: Received a grant titled “Advanced Algorithms for Nonlinear Constrained Stochastic Optimization” from the Office of Naval Research (in collaboration with Michael J. O’Neill)
- August 2024: Presented at the Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications (MOPTA) conference in Bethlehem, PA; also served on the organizing committee
- July 2024: Hosted Clément Royer (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL) as a research visitor in the IOE department
- July 2024: Presented at the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming in Montreal, Canada and organized 4 sessions
- July 2024: Our paper “Gradient Descent in the Absence of Global Lipschitz Continuity of the Gradients” (joint work with Vivak Patel) has been accepted for publication in the SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science
- June 2024: Presented at the 2nd Derivative-Free Optimization Symposium in Padova, Italy
- June 2024: Received a 2024 Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) award in collaboration with Professor Raed Al Kontar from the Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society (MIDAS) (WinAI: Propelling UM Soccer with Data-Driven AI)
- June 2024: New Paper “Modified Line Search Sequential Quadratic Methods for Equality-Constrained Optimization with Unified Global and Local Convergence Guarantees” (joint work with Raghu Bollapragada and Jiahao Shi)
- May 2024: Honored to be awarded the IISE Operations Research Division Teaching Award (link)
- May 2024: Thrilled to receive an Engaged Detroit Workshop Grant for our project Engineering Detroit’s Future: Empowering Detroit’s Next Generation through Engineering Exploration in collaboration with Leia Stirling and Patrícia Alves-Oliveira and the Detroit Educational Takeover and NSBE Detroit Professionals (link)
- April 2024: Hosted OPTIMAIZE DAY 2024 in collaboration with the Detroit Educational Takeover, a workshop for highschool students from Detroit
- April 2024: New Paper “Second-order Information Promotes Mini-Batch Robustness in Variance-Reduced Gradients” (joint work with Sachin Garg and Michał Dereziński)
- March 2024: Presented at the Control Seminar at the University of Michigan
- March 2024: Honored to be awarded the IOE Department Award
- February 2024: Our paper “Non-Uniform Smoothness for Gradient Descent” (joint work with Lindon Roberts and Fred Roosta) has been accepted for publication in Transactions on Machine Learning Research
- February 2024: Jiahao Shi will intern at Amazon this summer. Congratulations, Jiahao!
- January 2024: Honored to be awarded the 2024 North Campus Dean’s MLK Spirit Award for Community Building & Impact
(For the full list of news please check the News tab.)