Dr. Wotao Yin obtained his PhD in Operations Research from Columbia. He is the director of the Decision Intelligence Lab of Alibaba U.S. DAMO Academy. Before that, he was a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at UCLA. His research interests include computational optimization and its applications in signal processing, machine learning, and other data science problems. He invented fast algorithms for sparse optimization and large-scale distributed optimization. He has been among the top 1% of highly cited mathematicians since 2018. He received an NSF CAREER Award 2006, Sloan Research Award 2007, Morningside Gold Medal 2016, DAMO Award 2021, and Egon Balas Award 2021.