The Department of Statistics & Operations Research The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill HOTELLING LECTURES The Hotelling Lectures are an annual event in the Department of Statistics & Operations Research at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, honoring the memory of Professor Harold Hotelling our first chairman. This year we are honored to have Hotelling Lectures Professor Yurii Nesterov presented by from the Catholic University of Louvain deliver our two Yurii Nesterov Hotelling lectures which Center for Operations Research and are open to the public. Econometrics (CORE) Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium Hunting for Invisible Hands Monday, April 8th, 2019 3:30-4:30pm 120 Hanes Hall Reception following the lecture 4:30-5:30pm in the 3rd Floor lounge of Hanes Hall Soft clustering by convex electoral model Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 3:30-4:30pm 120 Hanes Hall Reception prior to the lecture 3:00-3:30pm in the 3rd Floor lounge of Hanes Hall Abstracts Hunting for Invisible Hands Monday, April 8th, 2019 In this talk, we discuss several optimization algorithms deeply incorporated in our daily life. In accordance to the standard Microeconomic Theory, we are surrounded by many invisible hands (Adam Smith, 1776), which are responsible for keeping the balanced production and ensuring the rationality of consumers. The main goal of this talk is to make some of these hands visible. We show that they correspond to several efficient optimization algorithms with provable efficiency bounds. Moreover, all computations required for their implementation are performed on subconscious level, which make them applicable even in the Wild Nature. Soft clustering by convex electoral model Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 In this talk, we analyze an electoral model based on random preferences of participants. Each voter can choose a party with certain probability depending on the divergence between his personal preferences and current position of the party. Our model represents a rare example of a community detection model (or, soft clustering) with unique equilibrium state. This is achieved by allowing the flexible positions for the parties (centers of clusters). We propose an efficient algorithm for finding the equilibrium state with linear rate of convergence. It can be interpreted as an alternating minimization scheme. Again, this is a rare example when such a scheme has provable global linear rate of convergence. Biography Yurii Nesterov has been a professor at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) at The Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium since 1993. He received his Ph.D. degree (Applied Mathematics) in 1984 at Institute of Control Sciences, Moscow. His research interests are related to complexity issues and efficient methods for solving various optimization problems. The main results are obtained in Convex Optimization (optimal methods for smooth problems, polynomial-time interior-point methods, smoothing technique for structural optimization, complexity theory for second-order methods, optimization methods for huge-scale problems). He is an author of 6 monographs and more than 100 refereed papers in the leading optimization journals. He has received several international prizes, among them: • Dantzig Prize from SIAM and Mathematical Programming Society (2000) • von Neumann Theory Prize from INFORMS (2009) • SIAM Outstanding paper award (2014) • Euro Gold Medal from Association of European Operations Research Societies (2016) • In 2018 he won an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council .