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Somayeh Sojoudi

Associate Professor

Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences

Mechanical Engineering

University of California, Berkeley

Email: sojoudi (at) berkeley.edu

Office: 5114 Etcheverry Hall

Brief Biography

I am an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and Mechanical Engineering departments at UC Berkeley. I work on interdisciplinary problems in optimization theory, machine learning, power systems, and control.

News

  • July 2024: I will serve as a Senior Program Committee member for AAAI 2025.

  • May 2024: Three members of our research group have completed their PhD exit seminars: 1) Ziye Ma will join the CS department at City University of Hong Kong as a tenure-track Assistant Professor; 2) Brendon Anderson will join the ME Department at California Polytechnic State University, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor; 3) Tanmay Gautam will join Microsoft Research as a research scientist.

  • December 2023: I will serve as an Area Chair for ICML 2024.

  • October 2023: Awarded a grant by the UC Noyce Initiative to enhance power grid security against cyberattacks.

  • October 2023: I gave an online distinguished lecture (for the IEEE Systems Council) on computational methods for solving non-convex machine learning problems.

  • August 2023: I will serve as an Area Chair for ICLR 2024.

  • April 2023: Elizabeth Glista has defended her Ph.D. thesis titled “Optimizing for the future smart grid: Efficient methods for nonconvex AC power flow problems” (dissertation slides).

  • March 2023: I will serve as a Senior Associate Editor for the IEEE Systems Journal.

  • March 2023: Two of my PhD students (Brendon Anderson and Ziye Ma) received the 2023 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.

  • March 2023: I will serve as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2023.

  • December 2022: I will serve as an Area Chair for ICML 2023.

  • September 2022: I gave a semi-plenary talk at the 8th IFAC Symposium on System Structure and Control (SSSC).

  • September 2022: I gave a Distinguished Lecture at Concordia University in Montreal.

  • October 2021: The paper “Efficient Global Optimization of Two-layer ReLU Networks: Adversarial Training and Quadratic-time Algorithms” by Yatong Bai, Tanmay Gautam, and myself received the INFORMS Data Mining Best Student Paper Award Runner-Up.

  • April 2021: I will serve as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2021.

  • January 2021: I received the NSF CAREER Award.

  • December 2020: Brendon Anderson has been awarded the 2021 John and Janet McMurtry Fellowship.

  • September 2020: The paper “Implicit Graph Neural Networks” to appear in 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020).

  • September 2020: Dr. Fernando Gama has joined my group as a postdoctoral researcher.

  • August 2020: Video of my plenary talk for the IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA), 2020.

  • May 2020: Salar Fattahi successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Structure-Aware Methods in Large-Scale Computational Problems: Machine Learning, Optimization, and Control”.

  • February 2020: Salar Fattahi will join University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020.

  • February 2020: I have been invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's 2020 Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

  • January 2020: I will give a plenary talk at the CCTA 2020.

  • April 2019: Cedric Josz will join Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2019.

  • December 2018: I received a grant from Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR).

  • October 2018: The Berkeley team led by me has been selected to receive funding to participate in the ARPA-E $4M Cash Prize Grid Optimization (GO) Competition (link 1, link 2).

  • September 2018: I received a grant from NSF.

  • July 2018: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor of IEEE Access.

  • June 2018: I received a grant from the Office of Naval Research.

  • May 2018: I will teach a 16-hour short course on Optimization and Machine Learning in Shenzhen, China, May 8-13.

  • January 2018: The paper “Closed-form Solution and Sparsity Path for Inverse Covariance Estimation Problem” has been selected as one of the five best student award finalists for the American Control Conference 2018.

  • January 2018: Our tutorial session “Optimization and Machine Learning: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications” has been accepted for the 2018 American Control Conference (contributors: Sam Coogan, Murat Arcak, Javad Lavaei, Richard Zhang, Cedric Josz, and Somayeh Sojoudi).

  • December 2017: I have given talks at McGill University, University of Melbourne and UC Berkeley's GraphXD seminar series on learning sparse graphical models.

  • August 2017: Dr. Cedric Josz has joined my group as a postdoctoral scholar.

  • August 2017: I will give a talk on machine learning at INFORMS 2017.

  • August 2017: I gave a seminar at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

  • June 2017: I have been appointed as a Conference Editorial Board (CEB) Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

  • August 2016: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.

  • December 2014: I am a co-author of a best student paper award finalist for the 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

  • October 2014: I chaired the session “Control Applications and Nonlinear Control” for IEEE 52nd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, 2014.

  • October 2014: I co-chaired the session ‘‘Stochastic Systems and Control" for IEEE 52nd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, 2014.