One Year Full of Great Experiences

When I think about the year that has passed, I cannot believe how much experience I have gained, both academically and personally. For sure, POEMA played the main role in making these changes happen. 

During the first few months of my PhD, I was mostly busy with courses. In fact, UoB requires every PhD student to collect 50 ECTS credits so I chose some taught modules offered by the School of Mathematics that were closest to my research project.  I had four 10 credit PhD courses in Conic Optimization, Nonlinear Programming, Heuristic optimization and Multicriteria decision making which developed my knowledge in these areas. As well as these courses, I was attending talks in the weekly UoB seminar 'Optimization and Numerical Analysis' with topics in Optimization area, before starting working from home due to the unfortunate pandemic situation. Since then, I have had regular meetings with my supervisor, Professor Michal Kočvara, who has worked closely with me and continued to help me in all areas of my research. 

 

As we, ESRs, have had fewer opportunities to meet due to the outbreak of Covid-19, in spring 2020, we initiated a series of online seminars to keep each other up to date about our research projects and try to find connections between our respective topics. I took a part in these meetings and also made a presentation on 24th of July 2020 which was a great opportunity to discuss my recent research with my collegues. Also, as English is not my first language, it was a great learning experience to present my work in another language which will enhance my confidence for the future. The follow-up to these seminars, the POEMA ESR Day, was held online on the 16th of October 2020 which was the sum of all those previous meetings. 

 

Furthermore, there had been other programs provided by the POEMA project that has kept us connected to each other and made us aware of new approaches in the area. For example, POEMA Learning Weeks were held online due to the pandemic from 27 May to 16 September 2020. This event included some courses that addressed different aspects of effective algebra, convex geometry, and polynomial optimization. Another program was POEMA Second Workshop from 20 October to 11 December 2020. This event was held open to the public, but also included an internal POEMA day on 27 November where I had the opportunity to give a 20minute talk under the title of 'An Interior-Point Method for Low-Rank Semidefinite Programming' which was a short summary of my recent research. This talk was one of my first opportunities to present my recent works to the POEMA team. This allowed me to gain some valuable feedback by others who were interested in my research area.

Another event that is worthwhile to mention is Arefeh's (ESR12) secondment at UoB. Even though there were lots of restrictions on travelling, she made it work and travelled to Birmingham to work together. Although the university was closed due to the pandemic, I was working closely with Arefeh and we were having some face-to-face meetings with Prof. Kočvara which was all very helpful. Also, we have been having some regular online meetings (approximately biweekly) between UoB and FAU. Our main focus during this period was on proving some features of new preconditioners designed for solving the Schur complement equation coming from the interior point method in solving SDP problems.

Another amazing experience in the past year was my first secondment at FAU from 1^st of October to the end of December 2020. In the next article of my blog, I will detail my experiences during this period.

All in all, this past year has provided some invaluable experiences and for sure added to my knowledge and personality. I am so glad to be part of this dynamic environment and I am excited to see where this journey will lead next.

 

                                       Internal POEMA day in the second workshop.