Department of Mathematics
Illinois State University
Contact
Email: mkarim3 at ilstu.edu
Office: Stevenson Hall - STV 309B
About me
I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Math, Illinois State University. Before, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Florida Tech, a Research Data Scientist at Cerebri AI, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, working with Dr. Levent Tuncel. My research interests are designing optimization algorithms, creating software packages including my DDS code for convex optimization problems, optimization of modern power networks, and implementing machine learning and deep learning algorithms for complicated engineering problems. You can read more about my research here.
I love teaching, specially performing new methods of learning and teaching in classrooms. I have completed Fundamentals of University Teaching and Certificate of University Teaching programs. My Project was about implementing Peer-Instruction in mathematics.
News
- March 2024: My 2-year NSF grant was awarded. The title is "Intelligent Modeling and Parameter Selection in Distributed Optimization for Power Networks".
- Jan 2024: A new version of our optimization software package Domain-Driven Solver (DDS) 2.2 was released in Januray 2024. This new version has extensive updates for quantum relative entropy (QRE) programming. The current version can solve much larger instances of QRE programming.
Education
- Ph.D. in Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, Canada, Jan 2013-August 2017
- Certificate in University Teaching, University of Waterloo, Canada, May 2013-Dec 2014
- Masters in Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, Canada, May 2011-Dec 2012
- Ph.D. and Masters in Electrical Engineering, Sharif University, Iran, Sep 2004-Dec 2010
- Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Iran, Sep 2000-Aug 2004
Research Interests
- Optimization and mathematical programming
- Optimization software and applications
- Interplay of optimization and machine learning
- Hyperbolic programming and sum-of-squares techniques
- Optimization in power systems, communications, and smart grids
- Convex analysis
- Interior-point methods