A renowned engineering scholar, Professor Ye Yinyu, delivered a lecture on 4 January in the latest installment of City University of Hong Kong’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Distinguished Lecture Series: Frontiers in Operations Research/ Operations Management.

In his lecture, titled “Recent Algorithmic Developments for the Markov Decision/ Game Process”, Professor Ye said the classical policy-iteration method was a strongly polynomial-time algorithm for solving discounted Markov decision processes (MDP) of any fixed discount factor.

He also discussed new results for solving MDP approximately by a careful modification of approximate value iteration, and simple and efficient variants that could be applied to solving large-scale linear programmes.

Professor Ye is the K.T. Li Chair Professor of Engineering at the Department of Management Science and Engineering and Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University. He is also Director of the Stanford Management Science and Engineering Department Industrial Affiliates Programme.