Marcel Silva receives an Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies award

Marcel de Carli Silva was awarded an Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies honour at the spring 2014 convocation. This award is presented to one PhD student and one MMath student at each of the spring and fall convocations. Previous recipients of the award include Mathieu Guay-Paquet (PhD, C&O, spring 2013) and Peter Nelson (PhD, C&O spring 2012).

Marcel's thesis, entitled "Geometric Ramification of the Lovász Theta Function and Their Interplay with Duality", was written under the supervision of Professor Levent Tunçel. The thesis lays the foundation for using semidefinite optimization and convex analysis in a way analogous to how polyhedral combinatorics has been using linear optimization to construct min-max theories and efficient, powerful and elegant primal-dual algorithms.

Marcel is presently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.