Haitham Hindi, Ph.D. (Walmart, Inc., USA): Pricing Millions of Products Online - a Data Driven Convex Optimization Approach

Everyone (even from outside the department, faculty, university) is warmly welcome at the talk given by our colleague and friend Haitham Hindi. His talk will start at 10am at K14 seminar room, ground floor of Building E, CVUT campus at Karlovo namesti 13, Praha. The seminar will take 60 minutes including discussion. This seminar will be immediately followed (at 11am) by another talk given by another speaker, see the separate announcement.

Abstract: The problem of pricing products in a large on-line retailer is characterized by three distinctive features: (i) The number of decision variables is very large, (ii) pricing decisions can be taken frequently to react to market changes and (iii) the majority of items in the catalog need not sell regularly. In this talk we will give an introduction to convex optimization models for e-commerce pricing that can lead to scalable pricing algorithms and we will introduce some recent work to robustify our models against the uncertainty associated with slow-moving items.

Bio: Haitham Hindi received his MS and PhD from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering. His interests are in optimization and control, and their application to real-world problems. He is currently a principal engineer at Walmart Labs, working on optimization algorithms for online pricing, advertising, and revenue management. His prior work was in: robotic radiation treatment devices; energy management systems; networked and hybrid control; manufacturing and transportation networks; matrix rank reduction; nonlinear control systems; particle accelerators; and disk drives.