December 16, 2015
Prof. Pablo Parrilo is one of five MIT EECS faculty members to have been named IEEE Fellows, the highest grade of membership in the IEEE. The grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors to those with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The new fellows are among only a tenth of a percent of IEEE members awarded the rank in a given year.
The EECS announcement states: "Prof. Parrilo was elected an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to semidefinite and sum-of-squares optimization". He is one of the leading researchers in mathematical optimization and systems and control theory. His work has built new bridges between convex optimization and computational algebraic geometry, which have significantly expanded the impact and applications of optimization to new areas of engineering, statistics and machine learning. Pablo has made seminal contributions in polynomial optimization and matrix rank minimization, as well as in areas as diverse as game theory and quantum information theory. He has received numerous distinctions, including the Donald P. Eckman Award, the SIAG/CST Prize, and the Farkas Prize."