Afonso Bandeira: inaugural lecture
On 26 October, Professor Afonso Bandeira gave his inaugural lecture entitled: "Computation, statistics, and optimization of random functions". He has been professor at the Department since September 2019.
Laudatio by Robert Weismantel, Head of Department
Alfonso is living in a little place in Oberwil by Zug, that is essentially the size of where he was born in Portugal. He went through university education in Coimbra Portugal and after finishing his master went to the US. He completed his PhD in Princeton in the years 2010 to 2015. After a short postdoc phase at MIT, he was a faculty member at New York University from 2016 to 2019. First as an assistant professor, then he got promoted to associate professor with tenure. Luckily he agreed to come to ETH in 2019.
His research area is a little bit hard to define in classical terms. One can call it mathematics of data science. This is a pretty novel area. It is somewhere between probability, statistics, optimization, applied mathematics, graph theory and computer science. He has written several papers and is already pretty famous for lots of his contributions. I want to briefly mention what he is doing. So in my own words: he would take an optimization problem which is known to be hard from a computational complexity point of view and then would try to study it from a more probabilistic point of view: let us consider all kinds of instances and then try to proof a theorem that with very high probability we can approximate the optimization problem within a factor of 1.5 but not better than this. This is the kind of research Alfonso is interested in. He has had several contributions to statistical and algorithmic understanding of inverse problems in networks, including his famous work on community detection.
He also can be proud of his several contributions to understand computational limitations in inference problems particularly when they are very high dimensional. The machinery he tries to develop uses methods from graph theory and computer science. In particular he uses quite a bit of knowledge from random graphs and random matrices and in fact some of these tools he also developed with his co-authors.
So it comes as no surprise that he already received several distinctions. In 2018 he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2019 he received an award for young scientists from the International Society for Analysis its Applications and Computation. In 2020 he received an Information Theory Society Paper Award and very recently he got the Stephen Smale Price. All these achievements distinguish Alfonso, but apart from this he is a great colleague and kind person.