Stephen Vavasis

Stephen Vavasis is University Research Chair and Professor of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, where he conducts research in numerical analysis, optimization, and machine learning. Vavasis earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University before completing his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University, where his fellowship began in 1985. His research has contributed to the theory of interior-point methods for linear programming, to numerical analysis algorithms for finite element methods, and more recently to the mathematical foundations of machine learning, including nonnegative matrix factorization and neural network optimization.