Stephen P. Boyd is an American professor and

control Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controllin ...

theorist. He is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, Professor in Electrical Engineering, and professor by courtesy in Computer Science and Management Science & Engineering at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. He is also affiliated with Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME). In 2014, Boyd was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

for contributions to engineering design and analysis via convex optimization.

Academic biography

Education

Boyd received an AB degree in mathematics, summa cum laude, from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1980, and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1985 under the supervision of Charles A. Desoer, S. Shankar Sastry and Leon Ong Chua. While at

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

, he was awarded a

Hertz Fellowship The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an American non-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. The fellowship provides $250,000 of support over five years. The ...

(1982) and received the Hertz Thesis Prize (1985).

Hertz Foundation The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an American non-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. The fellowship provides $250,000 of support over five years. Th ...

. In 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and in 2017, from the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

Career

Boyd joined the faculty of

's Electrical Engineering department in 1985. He regularly teaches undergraduate courses in applied linear algebra and machine learning. During his time at Stanford, he has been recognized with several teaching awards, including the 2016 Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching, the school's highest teaching honor.Kathleen J. Sullivan
"Stanford's 2016 Cuthbertson, Dinkelspiel and Gores awards honor faculty, staff and students,"
Stanford News, June 7, 2016. He was awarded the 2017 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, in recognition of his efforts in education in the theory and application of optimization, which has sparked the writing of improved linear algebra and convex optimization textbooks."Stephen P. Boyd accepts the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal – Honors Ceremony 2017,"
IEEE.tv, June 2, 2017. He has served as director of Stanford's Information Systems Laboratory,
Stanford.edu, January 9, 2018. and as a visiting professor at universities including

City University of Hong Kong City University of Hong Kong (CityU) is a world-class public research university located in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. It was founded in 1984 as City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and became a fully accredited university in 1994. Currently, CityU is ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

Royal Institute of Technology The KTH Royal Institute of Technology ( sv, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, lit=Royal Institute of Technology), abbreviated KTH, is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH conducts research and education in engineering and technolo ...

in Stockholm, and

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven KU Leuven (or Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Belgium. It conducts teaching, research, and services in computer science, engineering, natural sciences, theology, humanities, medicine, l ...

in Belgium. While at Stanford, he has consulted with numerous

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

tech companies, and founded one. His groups' CVXGEN software is used in

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and a satellite communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated goal of ...

Falcon 9 Falcon 9 is a partially reusable medium lift launch vehicle that can carry cargo and crew into Earth orbit, produced by American aerospace company SpaceX. The rocket has two stages. The first (booster) stage carries the second stage and payl ...

and

Falcon Heavy Falcon Heavy is a partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle that is produced by SpaceX, an American aerospace manufacturer. The rocket consists of two strap-on boosters made from Falcon 9 first stages, a center core also made from a Falc ...

to guide their autonomous precision landing.

Research

Boyd's primary research interests are

convex optimization Convex optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that studies the problem of minimizing convex functions over convex sets (or, equivalently, maximizing concave functions over convex sets). Many classes of convex optimization probl ...

, especially applications in

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniq ...

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, and finance. His PhD dissertation was on

Volterra series The Volterra series is a model for non-linear behavior similar to the Taylor series. It differs from the Taylor series in its ability to capture "memory" effects. The Taylor series can be used for approximating the response of a nonlinear system t ...

descriptions of nonlinear circuits and devices. His primary focus then turned to

automatic control Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...

systems, where he focused on applying convex optimization, specifically linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), to a variety of control system analysis and synthesis problems.Kylie Jue
"Q&A: Professor Stephen Boyd talks election to National Academy of Engineering,"
''

Stanford Daily ''The Stanford Daily'' is the student-run, independent daily newspaper serving Stanford University. ''The Daily'' is distributed throughout campus and the surrounding community of Palo Alto, California, United States. It has published since the U ...

'', February 24, 2014. With Craig Barratt, he authored ''Linear Controller Design: Limits of Performance'' in 1991. In 1994, Boyd and Laurent El Ghaoui,

Eric Feron Eric Marie Feron is a computer scientist and aerospace engineer. He has been the Dutton/Ducoffe Professor of Aerospace Software Engineering at Georgia Tech since 2005. He taught at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 1993 until ...

, and Ragu Balakrishnan authored the book ''Linear Matrix Inequalities in System & Control Theory''. Around 1999, he and Lieven Vandenberghe developed a PhD-level course and wrote the book ''Convex Optimization'' to introduce and apply convex optimization to other fields. In 2005 he and Michael Grant developed the

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation ...

open source software package CVX, which makes it easy to specify and solve convex optimization problems. This work earned them the 2012 Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming. In 2012 he and Jacob Mattingley developed CVXGEN, which generates fast custom code for small, quadratic-programming-representable convex optimization problems, using an online interface. With minimal effort, it turns a mathematical problem description into a high-speed solver. Open source software packages developed by his research group are widely used, and include, * CVXPY, * SCS, first-order primal-dual cone solver for large problems * OSQP (with Oxford). Boyd is ranked top 10 scientist in the field of Engineering and Technology.

Business and patents

Boyd co-founded and served as chief scientist of analog synthesis and intellectual property provider Barcelona Design, from its 1999 founding until it folded in 2005. He serves in an advisory capacity for

BlackRock BlackRock, Inc. is an American Multinational corporation, multi-national investment company based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a Enterprise risk management, risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackR ...

, an investment management corporation; Petuum, a machine learning platform for artificial intelligence; and H2O.ai, open source machine learning platform. He is also a co-inventor on 11 patents. On his personal website, which is visited more than 1.6 million times per year, he makes available papers, books, software, lecture notes and lecture videos.

Awards and honors

Fellow, 1980 * AACC Donald P. Eckman Award, 1992 *

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

, 1999 * Mathematical Optimization Society Beale-Orchard-Hays Award, 2012 *

IEEE Control Systems Award The IEEE Control Systems Award is a technical field award given to an individual by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for outstanding contributions to control systems engineering, science or technology". It is an IEE ...

, 2013 * Member, US

, inducted 2014 * 2014

INFORMS The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics. It was established in 1995 with the merger of ...

Saul Gass Expository Writing Award *

SIAM Fellow The SIAM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognizes outstanding members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The goal of the program is to: *honor SIAM members who are recognized by their peers as distinguished ...

, 2015 * Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford, 2016 *

Fellow, 2016 * IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, 2017 * Foreign Member,

Chinese Academy of Engineering The Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE, ) is the national academy of the People's Republic of China for engineering. It was established in 1994 and is an institution of the State Council of China. The CAE and the Chinese Academy of Sciences ...

, 2017 * 2019 Athanasios Papoulis Award,

EURASIP The European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) is an international scientific society for the theory and application of signal processing. It was established on the 1st of September 1978.It hosts the European Signal Processing Conference ( ...

* Foreign Member,

National Academy of Engineering of Korea The National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK; ) is a Korean nonprofit, non-governmental organization founded to support engineering and technology development in academia, industry, and national institutions; and to contribute to the develo ...

(NAEK), 2020 "IEEE CDC 2020"
accessed 10/13/20.

Bibliography

* ''Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra - Vectors, Matrices, and Least Squares'' (

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing hou ...

, 2018) – with Lieven Vandenberghe
full book PDF by the authors
* ''Convex Optimization'' (

, 2004) – with Lieven Vandenberghe
full book PDF by the authors
* ''Linear Matrix Inequalities in System and Control Theory'' (

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific socie ...

, 1994) – with Laurent El Ghaoui, Eric Feron and Vendataramanan Balakrishnan
full book PDF by the copyright holders
* ''Linear Controller Design: Limits of Performance'' (

Prentice Hall Prentice Hall was an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market, and distributes its technical titles through the Safari B ...

, 1991) – with Craig H. Barratt
full book PDF available from the authors

References

External links

*

Stephen P. Boyd executive profile
on

Bloomberg.com Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg Televi ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Boyd, Stephen Living people People from Ann Arbor, Michigan Harvard College alumni UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty Control theorists Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Fellow Members of the IEEE Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Year of birth missing (living people) Foreign members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences American electrical engineers