This course aims to offer practical techniques to solve hard optimization problems by the latest computing technology. These problems can be found in a variety of applications in ecommerce, networking, and cloud computing, such as combinatorial auction, group buying, network virtualization, and resource allocation. Upon completing the course, students will be familiar with applied optimization techniques and able to use optimization to formulate and solve large-scale problems.

The course includes two parts. In the first part, we introduce fundamentals of optimization formulation and the usage of modern Solvers (such as Cplex and Gurobi). In the second part, we investigate some typical optimization problems, in particular, in e-commerce and telecommunication, and study how to design tailor-made algorithms to solve them. Students will be required to do projects of implementing their designs.