LIDS/ALL 2013

The magazine of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

In this issue, you'll find an interview with staff member Rachel Cohen, two senior graduate students Ammar Ammar and Kimon Drakopoulos, postdoctoral researcher Vahideh Manshadi, Professor Dimitri Bertsekas, alumna Angelia Nedich, and advisory committee member Henrique Malvar.

A Message from the Director

On behalf of the entire LIDS community, let me welcome you to the Fall 2013 volume of LIDS|ALL. Within these pages you’ll find...

The Language of Math

Dimitri Bertsekas’ forty-four years of contributions to areas such as optimization theory, data networks, dynamic programming, and large-scale computation proves nearly...

Looking Beyond

In the early 1980s, Henrique “Rico” Malvar was just starting out in his academic career. He’d never lived outside of Brazil and had a wife, a young daughter, and an assistant professorship...

Smart Graphs

Four years ago, when Kimon Drakopoulos was twenty-two, he left Greece to start his master’s degree at LIDS. It was an academic triumph, but just as much a personal one.

Miracle Matches

At LIDS and MIT's Operations Research Center (MIT-ORC), post-doc Vahideh Manshadi solves matching problems for a very specialized marketplace—one that ultimately enables more people to access life-saving kidney transplants.

A New Kind of Puzzle

Angelia Nedich has been solving puzzles for as long as she can remember. As a child, she played puzzle games with her parents. As she grew, her skills developed and her interest in solving problems remained strong.

Ranking the Possibilities

From earliest childhood, Ammar Ammar was fascinated by all things electronic and mechanical: cameras, radios, household gadgets, and appliances. "I took apart most of the small clocks in our house to try and see what made them tick."

Sound Bites with Rachel Cohen

It's a wonderful place to work. I seem to have lucked into a place that is really good at understanding family needs. My son, Avi, is 10, and my daughter, Leah, is 13. My favorite aspect of LIDS is the quality of a work-life balance.