Dorit S. Hochbaum is a distinguished professor in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at UC Berkeley. Professor Hochbaum holds a Ph.D from the Wharton school of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in areas of discrete optimization, network flow techniques, data mining, image segmentation, supply chain management and efficient utilization of resources. Her work contributed to the analysis of heuristics and approximation algorithms in the worst case, and on average, to the complexity analysis of algorithms in general, and nonlinear optimization algorithms in particular. Her theoretical work focuses on particularly efficient techniques using network flow for data mining and image segmentation including parametric flow for the convex Markov Random Fields problem establishing it as polynomial; the PseudoFlow algorithm for the maximum flow problem and the parametric flow and cut algorithms. Her recent research is on problems relating to machine learning on recognizing bias in labeled data; reducing dependence in training data; using pairwise relationships to enhance clustering methods. Applications include improved yield prediction in semi-conductor manufacturing; devising balanced covariates for experimental design; the maximum diversity and dispersion problem and group rankings and aggregate decision problems.
Professor Hochbaum is the author of over 190 papers that appeared in the Operations Research, Management Science and Theoretical Computer Science literature. She served as department editor for Management Science department of Optimization and Modeling, and on a number of editorial boards
Professor Hochbaum was named in 2004 as honorary doctorate of Sciences of the University of Copenhagen, for her work on approximation algorithms. She was appointed the Pinhas Naor lecturer of the Technion for 2013, and a Research Excellence professor at the University of Vienna in 2007. She is the winner of the 2011 INFORMS Computing Society prize for her work on algorithms for image segmentation. Professor Hochbaum is a fellow of INFORMS and a fellow of SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics).