Applied mathematician Claudia Sagastizábal gives public talk at UBC
Claudia Sagastizábal gives a free public talk on managing power-plant electricity generation on Wednesday, July 23, 2 to 3 p.m. in the Sciences Building, Room SCI 396.
What: Public lecture: Optimization put to good use in energy problems
Who: Claudia Sagastizábal
When: Wednesday, July 23, 2 to 3 p.m.
Where: SCI 396, Sciences Building, UBC’s Okanagan campus, Kelowna
Applied mathematician Claudia Sagastizábal, a leading international specialist in the area of optimization, arrives from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for three weeks at UBC’s Okanagan campus to collaborate and network with UBC researchers in mathematics and engineering. She will also give a public talk — Optimization put to good use in energy problems — focused on energy sustainability.
In her lecture, Sagastizábal will examine problems in managing a mix of power plants generating electricity, using optimization modeling. The free public talk takes place Wednesday, July 23, 2 to 3 p.m. in the Sciences Building, Room SCI 396, UBC’s Okanagan campus, Kelowna. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. Pay parking is available.
“An optimizer has the ability to build a model that guides the plant manager in planning how much electricity to produce from each source of energy: hydraulic, nuclear, coal, wind, solar,” says Sagastizábal. The modeling includes definition of goals, such as minimizing carbon footprints, maximizing revenue, or reducing risk of blackouts.
“However, the manager’s choices are limited by the production capacity, physical laws for each technology, and prediction of public consumption,” says Sagastizábal.
Sagastizábal will discuss how to model such issues and exploit structural properties of nonsmooth objective functions. She has participated in academic and industrial collaborations since her PhD studies, with research interests in the areas of nonsmooth optimization, stochastic programming, and variational analysis, and are driven by real-life applications.
Sagastizábal’s visit to UBC is supported by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s International Distinguished Visitors program.
Sagastizábal holds or has held consulting research and development appointments for companies such as Électricité de France, Gaz de France-Suez and Renault in France; Robert Bosch in Germany; and Petrobras, Bovespa and Eletrobras in Brazil.
After concluding her undergrad studies in Argentina, Sagastizábal obtained her PhD and habilitation degrees at Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne University. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, and has held permanent positions at the French Institute for Automatic Control and Computer Science (INRIA), and at the Brazilian Electric Energy Research Center (CEPEL-Eletrobras). Sagastizábal is co-author of the book Numerical Optimization: Theoretical and Practical Aspects.
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