Introduction - Prof. Thirumulanathan D

Hello everyone, it's a great pleasure to welcome you all to this fantastic world of optimization algorithms. As you all are aware, optimization is a mathematical tool that has a wider applicability. It is used in various fields of engineering, sciences, economics and data analysis as well. So whenever we want to maximize some performance measure or minimize cost, we end up at an optimization problem. For example, communication engineers maximize the speed of transmitting data and they also minimize the loss of transmission. Mechanical engineers minimize efficiency loss or maximize engine life span for example. Economists maximize the utility function of the consumers or the profits of the producers. And finally, in data analysis, the weights of neural networks are tuned by minimizing certain loss function, which ends up in optimization as well. So, if you are actually minimizing some simple function, subject to some simple constraints, one can actually solve such an optimization problem analytically using pen and paper. But when the problem becomes hard, for example, when you have many optimizing variables for example, or when the function to be optimized is very complicated. So in such cases, we want to outsource this optimization to a computer and that is where optimization algorithms are required. So in this course, we will actually be learning both the theory as well as the implementation of these algorithms using Python, that is you learn both the theory as well as the implementation. The prerequisites of this course is some basic knowledge on optimization. So if you have taken one basic course on optimization, then you are eligible to register for this course. But nevertheless, we will rapidly cover the basics of optimization in the first two or three lectures and after that, we will actually cover the basics of Python coding. So in case you are not very familiar with Python coding, it is okay, I mean we will cover in the next few lectures and after that, we will actually move to optimization algorithms. So with these few words, I welcome you once again to the world of optimization algorithms.