Somayeh Sojoudi

Assistant Professor in Residence

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Research Areas

Control, Intelligent Systems, and Robotics (CIR)
Energy (ENE)
Signal Processing (SP)
Convex Optimization; Polynomial Optimization; Sparse Optimization: Applications in Machine Learning, Control and Signal Processing.

Research Centers

Tsinghua-UC Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI)

Teaching Schedule

Fall 2020

EE 227BT. Convex Optimization, TuTh 11:00AM - 12:29PM, Internet/Online

Spring 2021

EE C128. Feedback Control Systems, TuTh 11:00AM - 12:29PM, Requested General Assignment

Biography

Somayeh Sojoudi is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also on the faculty of the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI). She received her PhD degree in Control & Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology in 2013. She has been working on several interdisciplinary problems in optimization theory, control theory, machine learning, and power systems. Somayeh Sojoudi is an Associate Editor for the journals of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, IEEE Access, and Systems & Control Letters. She is also a member of the conference editorial board of the IEEE Control Systems Society. She has received the 2015 INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers and the 2016 INFORMS Energy Best Publication Award. Her papers were finalist for the Best Student Paper Award of the 2018 American Control Conference and the 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Her paper entitled “Homotopy Method for Finding the Global Solution of Post-contingency Optimal Power Flow” has won the Best Student Paper Award of the 2020 American Control Conference. Somayeh’s paper on graphical models has received the INFORMS 2018 Data Mining Best Paper Award.

Education

2013, PhD, Control & Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology

Selected Publications

S. Fattahi and S. Sojoudi, "Exact Guarantees on the Absence of Spurious Local Minima for Non-negative Rank-1 Robust Principal Component Analysis.," Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 21, no. 59, pp. 1--51, 2020.
B. Anderson, Z. Ma, J. Li, and S. Sojoudi, "Tightened Convex Relaxations for Neural Network Robustness Certification," in IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2020.
E. Glista and S. Sojoudi, "Convex model to evaluate worst-case performance of local search in the Optimal Power Flow problem," in IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2020.
S. Fattahi and S. Sojoudi, "Graphical lasso and thresholding: Equivalence and closed-form solutions," The Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 364--407, 2019.
S. Sojoudi, S. Fattahi, and J. Lavaei, "Convexification of generalized network flow problem," Mathematical Programming, 2018.
R. Madani, S. Sojoudi, G. Fazelnia, and J. Lavaei, "Finding low-rank solutions of sparse linear matrix inequalities using convex optimization," SIAM Journal on Optimization, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 725--758, 2017.
S. Sojoudi, "Equivalence of graphical lasso and thresholding for sparse graphs," Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 17, no. 115, pp. 1--21, 2016.
S. Sojoudi, "Graphical lasso and thresholding: Conditions for equivalence," in Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on, 2016, pp. 7042--7048.
R. Madani, S. Sojoudi, and J. Lavaei, "Convex relaxation for optimal power flow problem: Mesh networks," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 199--211, 2015.
S. Sojoudi and J. Lavaei, "Exactness of semidefinite relaxations for nonlinear optimization problems with underlying graph structure," SIAM Journal on Optimization, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 1746--1778, 2014.

Awards, Memberships and Fellowships

INFORMS Data Mining (DM) Best Paper Award, 2018
INFORMS Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment (ENRE) Best Publication Award in Energy, 2016
INFORMS Optimization Society Young Researchers Prize, 2015