Fall 2005 Seminar Series

Retsef Levi was born on March 7, 1971 in Tel-Aviv, Israel. He served about 12 years as an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces. Levi received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics with a trend in Operations Research from Tel-Aviv University, Israel in 2001. After several months in a business development position with an Israeli hi-tech company, in the winter of 2002 Levi arrived to Cornell to pursue a PhD degree in Operations Research. In the summer of 2005 he graduate and started his Goldstine postdoctoral fellowship at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. In the summer of 2006 Levi will begin an Assistant Professor position at MIT, the operations management group in Sloan Business School.

 

His current research is focused on the design of efficient algorithms with analyzed worst-case performance for fundamental stochastic optimization models, arising in the context of supply chains, inventory management and logistics. These fundamental multi-stage stochastic models are typically very hard to solve to optimality, both theoretically and in practice. Hence, it is important to develop efficient heuristics that provide provably near-optimal policies for these hard models. Levi is also interested in modern LP-based approximation techniques applied to deterministic models in the above domains. In addition, he is interested in combinatorial optimization and mathematical programming in their broad definition, and especially in their intersection with problems that arise in the context of real life applications.