@article {dasilva2017uls,
	title = {A unified 2D/3D large scale software environment for nonlinear inverse problems},
	journal = {ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software},
	year = {2019},
	note = {Accepted on January 27, 2019.},
	abstract = {Large scale parameter estimation problems are some of the most computationally demanding problems. An academic researcher{\textquoteright}s domain-specific knowledge often precludes that of software design, which results in software frameworks for inversion that are technically correct, but not scalable to realistically-sized problems. On the other hand, the computational demands of the problem for realistic problems result in industrial codebases that are geared solely for performance, rather than comprehensibility or flexibility. We propose a new software design that bridges the gap between these two seemingly disparate worlds. A hierarchical and modular design allows a user to delve into as much detail as she desires, while using high performance primitives at the lower levels. Our code has the added benefit of actually reflecting the underlying mathematics of the problem, which lowers the cognitive load on user using it and reduces the initial startup period before a researcher can be fully productive. We also introduce a new preconditioner for the Helmholtz equation that is suitable for fault-tolerant distributed systems. Numerical experiments on a variety of 2D and 3D test problems demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on scaling algorithms from small to large scale problems with minimal code changes.},
	keywords = {large scale, Matlab, Optimization, PDE-constrained inversion},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Journals/ACMTOMS/2019/dasilva2017uls/dasilva2017uls.html},
	author = {Curt Da Silva and Felix J. Herrmann}
}
@conference {fang2017AIPepm,
	title = {An efficient penalty method for PDE-constrained optimization problem with source estimation and stochastic optimization},
	booktitle = {Applied Inverse Problems Annual Conference Proceedings},
	year = {2017},
	note = {(AIP, Hangzhou)},
	month = {05-06},
	pages = {40},
	abstract = {Many inverse problems in applied science and engineering can be written as PDE-constrained optimization problems. Typically, one is interested in estimating the unknown medium parameters of the PDE describing the system, given multi-source measurements of the fields in the true medium. The objective function is often very oscillatory, which gives rise to problematic local minima, and merely evaluating one or more of its derivatives requires solving multiple PDEs, which are expensive. In many applications such as seismic exploration, only the source location is available and the source signature itself is unknown, which results in erroneous estimated parameters. In this work, we propose a penalty method to solve the PDE-constrained optimization problem, whereby we replace the PDE constraints by a two-norm penalty term, which leads to a bi-linear optimization problem with a much less oscillatory objective function. By applying the variable projection method, we develop an efficient method to invert the unknown parameters and source signatures simultaneously. To reduce the computational cost, we randomly select a subset of all data to update the parameters at each iteration. Numerical examples demonstrate that this method is less prone to becoming stuck in harmful local minima and is able to successfully invert the unknown parameters and source signature with less computational cost compared to using all the data.},
	keywords = {Optimization, penalty method, source estimation, Stochastic optimization},
	url = {http://aip2017.csp.escience.cn/dct/page/1},
	presentation = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/AIP/2017/fang2017AIPepm/fang2017AIPepm_pres.pdf},
	author = {Zhilong Fang and Curt Da Silva and Felix J. Herrmann}
}
@mastersthesis {dasilva2017THlso,
	title = {Large-scale optimization algorithms for missing data completion and inverse problems},
	year = {2017},
	note = {(PhD)},
	month = {09},
	school = {The University of British Columbia},
	type = {phd},
	address = {Vancouver},
	abstract = {Inverse problems are an important class of problems found in many areas of science and engineering. In these problems, one aims to estimate unknown parameters of a physical system through indirect multi-experiment measurements. Inverse problems arise in a number of fields including seismology, medical imaging, and astronomy, among others. An important aspect of inverse problems is the quality of the acquired data itself. Real-world data acquisition restrictions, such as time and budget constraints, often results in measured data with missing entries. Many inversion algorithms assume that the input data is fully sampled and relatively noise free and produce poor results when these assumptions are violated. Given the multidimensional nature of real-world data, we propose a new low-rank optimization method on the smooth manifold of Hierarchical Tucker tensors. Tensors that exhibit this low-rank structure can be recovered from solving this non-convex program in an efficient manner. We successfully interpolate realistically sized seismic data volumes using this approach. If our low-rank tensor is corrupted with non-Gaussian noise, the resulting optimization program can be formulated as a convex-composite problem. This class of problems involves minimizing a non-smooth but convex objective composed with a nonlinear smooth mapping. In this thesis, we develop a level set method for solving composite-convex problems and prove that the resulting subproblems converge linearly. We demonstrate that this method is competitive when applied to examples in noisy tensor completion, analysis-based compressed sensing, audio declipping, total-variation deblurring and denoising, and one-bit compressed sensing. With respect to solving the inverse problem itself, we introduce a new software design framework that manages the cognitive complexity of the various components involved. Our framework is modular by design, which enables us to easily integrate and replace components such as linear solvers, finite difference stencils, preconditioners, and parallelization schemes. As a result, a researcher using this framework can formulate her algorithms with respect to high-level components such as objective functions and hessian operators. We showcase the ease with which one can prototype such algorithms in a 2D test problem and, with little code modification, apply the same method to large-scale 3D problems.},
	keywords = {convex composite, interpolation, low-rank, Optimization, PhD, software design, tensor, tensor completion},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2017/dasilva2017THlso/dasilva2017THlso.pdf},
	presentation = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2017/dasilva2017THlso/dasilva2017THlso_pres.pdf},
	author = {Curt Da Silva}
}
