Duffield Hall at sunset.
Woman taking a photo of a mumified bird
Two students walking on Engineering Quad towards Duffield
Two students working on a autonomous plane
Students walking along Ho Plaza

Yudong Chen

Associate Professor (on leave)
Operations Research and Information Engineering

Biography

Yudong Chen joined the faculty at Cornell in August 2015 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013, and his Bachelor and Master degrees from Tsinghua University in 2008. Before coming to Cornell, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include machine learning, statistical inference, optimization and networks.

Research Interests

Professor Chen’s primary research focus is in to developing theory and algorithms for efficient analysis of large-scale data sets and networks, and to understand the fundamental limits imposed by the characteristics of the problem. He is interested in developing and analyzing statistical and machine learning algorithms that are both computationally efficient and robust to noise. He has worked on problems in high-dimensional statistics, sparse and low-rank estimation, community detection and clustering in networks, as well as applications in communication and transportation networks.

Teaching Interests

Professor Chen teaches Statistical Principles (ORIE 6700; Fall 2015, Fall 2016) and Statistical Data Mining I (ORIE 4740; Spring 2016, Spring 2017).

 

Selected Publications

  • Chen, Y., H. Xu, C. Caramanis, S Sanghavi. 2016.“Matrix Completion With Column Manipulation: Near-Optimal Sample-Robustness-Rank Tradeoffs.”IEEE Transactions on Information Theory62(1): 503-526.
  • Yi, Xinyang, Dohyung Park, Yudong Chen, Constantine Caramanis. 2016.“Fast Algorithms for Robust PCA via Gradient Descent.”Paper presented at Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS)
  • Lim, S.-H., Yudong Chen, Huan Xu. 2015.“A Convex Optimization Framework for Bi-Clustering.”Paper presented at International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
  • Lim, S.H., Yudong Chen, Huan Xu. 2016.“Clustering from General Pairwise Observations with Applications to Time-varying Graphs.”Journal of Machine Learning Research.
  • Chen, Y., S. Bhojanapalli, S. Sanghavi, R Ward. 2015.“Completing Any Low-Rank Matrix, Provably.”Journal of Machine Learning Research16: 2999-3034.

Education

  • B.E. (Automation),Tsinghua University, Department of Automation, 2006
  • M.Eng. (Control Science and Engineering), Tsinghua University, Department of Automation, 2008
  • Ph.D. (Electrical and Computer Engineering), University of Texas at Austin, 2013

Websites