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José Verschae
Associate Professor
Instituto de Ingeniería Matemática y Computacional
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
jverschae "at" uc "dot" cl
Edificio Hernán Briones, Segundo Piso, Campus San Joaquín UC. Avda. Vicuña Mackenna 4860
Santiago, Chile
About me
I am an associate professor at the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at UC (IMC). I am also the Curriculum Director of Mathematical Engineering at the IMC and an associate editor of OR Letters and Acta Informatica. Until 2020 I was the director of the Institute of Engineering Sciences at Universidad de O'Higgins. Before I was an assistant professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, with a double appointment between the Department of Mathematics and the School of Engineering. During 2012-2014 I was a post-doc at the University of Chile, funded by a Fondecyt Postdoctoral Grant. I got my PhD at TU Berlin (2012) under the supervision of Martin Skutella, and before that I got a degree on Mathematical Engineering (Applied Mathematics) from University of Chile.
News
Until July 2024 I'm in a sabbatical period. During May and June 2024 I'll be visiting Columbia University. If you are interested in meeting me there let me know!
Our paper "Identifying outbreaks in sewer networks: An adaptive sampling scheme under network’s uncertainty" [link], together with J Baboun, I Beaudry, L Castro, F Gutierrez, A Jara, and B Rubio has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) [pnas]. See here for a note about it in spanish.
Starting May 2023 I'm an associate editor of Acta Informatica. Please consider submitting your work there.
I'm in the program committee of LAGOS 2023, FCT 2023, and LATIN 2024.
Starting September 2022 I'm an associate editor of the OR Letters journal. Please consider submitting your work there.
My project Fondecyt Regular "Symmetry Handling Methods: Fundamental Domains, Vector Orderings, and Partial Symmetries" is running. If you are a student looking for a master or PhD thesis with a strong background in mathematics, algorithms and/or optimization, feel free to contact me!
Old News
Our paper with M. Villagra and L. von Niederhäusern, On the Geometry of Symmetry Breaking Inequalities, has just been accepted to Mathematical Programming.
Our paper A Water-Filling Primal-Dual Algorithm for Approximating Non-Linear Covering Problems with Andrés Fielbaum and Ignacio Morales has just been accepted to SIDMA.
I'm giving the talk "A Primal-Dual Approximation Framework for Weighted Integer Covering Problems" at the Encuentro SOMACHI 2021 in UOH, Rancagua.
The XV Summer School in Discrete Mathematics will take place online next January with a set of excellent speakers. Don't hesitate to apply!
Our paper "Tight running times for minimum l_q-norm load balancing: beyond exponential dependencies on 1/\epsilon" with Lin Chen and Liangde Tao [arxiv] has just been accepted into SODA 2022.
We just uploaded a new version of our article "On the Geometry of Symmetry Breaking Inequalities" to ArXiv.
Our Summer School of Discrete Mathematics 2021 appeared in the March 2021 IFORs newsletter.
I have been invited to give a talk at MIP 2021 (online event). See the talk here.
I have been invited to give a talk at the OR seminar of Carnegie Melon University, in March 2021.
Our article "On the Geometry of Symmetry Breaking Inequalities" together with Matías Villagra and Léonard von Niederhäusern has been accepted to IPCO 2021 [pdf].
I am the chair of the Escuela de Verano de Matemáticas Discretas 2021.
I gave the talk "Simetrías en Optimización Discreta: Grupos y Geometría pdfpara un Mejor Diseño de Algoritmos" (in spanish) at the IMC seminar (09/09/2020).
Our paper " Symmetry Exploitation for Online Machine Covering with Bounded Migration" together with Waldo Galvez and José Soto has been accepted to ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
Our paper "Breaking symmetries to rescue SoS: The case of makespan scheduling" together with V. Verdugo and A. Wiese has been accepted to Mathematical Programming.
Our paper "A Water-Filling Primal-Dual Algorithm for Approximating Non-Linear Covering Problems" together with Andrés Fielbaum and Ignacio Morales has been accepted for ICALP 2020.
Research Interests
I specialize in combinatorial optimization and analysis of algorithms. My main area of research is approximation and online algorithms, mostly for scheduling and network design problems. My latest project is on understanding the implications of encountering symmetries in polyhedral combinatorics, and how these symmetries can be exploited. More generally, I have a broad interest on discrete mathematics, optimization, and theoretical computer science.
Coauthors
A. Antoniadis, J. Baboun, I. Beaudry, R. Carrasco, M. Castro, L. Chen, M. Cheung, J. Correa, D. Dadush, F. Eisenbrand, A. Fielbaum, M. Pfetsch, W. Galvez, A. Gupta, K. Jansen, A. Jara, T. Harks, N. Hänle, C. Hojny, C.-C. Huang, K.-M. Klein, A. Léonard, A. Marchetti-Spaccamela, S. T. McCormick, N. Megow, J. Mestre, J. Matuschke, I. Morales, M. Niemeier, S. Ott, B. Peis, K. Pruhs, R. Rischke, L. Rohwedder, U. Schmidt-Kraepelin, J. Soto, A. Schedel, A. Schulz, M. Skutella, D. B. Shmoys, C. Stein, O. Svensson, L. Stougie, B. Rubio, V. Verdugo, M. Villagra, L. von Niederhäusern, A. Wierz, A. Wiese.
Students
Victor Verdugo (co-advised with J. Correa), Ms Applied Math, UCH, 2014. Currently: Professor at Catholic University, Chile.
Christian von Borries (co-advised with J. Soto), Ms Applied Math, UCH, 2014. Currently: Software Engineer at Facebook
Waldo Galvez (co-advised with J. Soto), Ms Applied Math, UCH, 2015. Currently: Assitant Professor at U de O'Higgins
Ignacio Morales, Ms Industrial Engineering, U Católica, 2018. Currently: Jefe de proyectos BI y Analytics en Mosaico S.A.
Manuel Rogers, Ms Industrial Engineering, U Católica, 2018. Currently: Data Scientists at VTR.
Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ms Math. (co-advised with J. Matuschke), TU Munich, 2018. Currently: Prof. TU Enindhoven.
Matias Villagra, Ms Mathematics, U Catolica, 2020. Currently: PhD Student U. Columbia.
José Baboun, Ms Engineering Sciences, U Católica, 2023.
Benjamín Rubio, Ms Engineering Sciences, U Católica, 2023. Currently: PhD. student at Columbia U.
Agustín Caracci, Ms Mathematical and Computational Eng., U Católica, current.
Juan Cristobal Hernandez (co-advised with G. Angulo), Ms Engineering Sciences, U Católica, current.