Stephen P. Boyd is an American professor and control 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 Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. 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 organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

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 university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

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 to ...

, 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 begins with up to $250,000 of financial support ...

(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 begins with up to $250,000 of financial support ...

. 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 The City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) is a public research university in Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong. It was founded in 1984 as the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and formally established as the City University of Hong Kong in 1994 ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

Royal Institute of Technology KTH Royal Institute of Technology (), abbreviated KTH, is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH conducts research and education in engineering and technology and is Sweden's largest technical university. Since 2018, KTH consist ...

in Stockholm, and

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Belgium. Founded in 1425, it is the oldest university in Belgium and the oldest university in the Low Countries. In addition to its main camp ...

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

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is 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 area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

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

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an America, American space technology company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase, Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the compa ...

Falcon 9 Falcon 9 is a Reusable launch system#Partial reusable launch systems, partially reusable, two-stage-to-orbit, medium-lift launch vehicle designed and manufactured in the United States by SpaceX. The first Falcon 9 launch was on June 4, 2010, an ...

and

Falcon Heavy Falcon Heavy is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle with partial reusability that can carry cargo into Earth orbit and beyond. It is designed, manufactured and launched by American aerospace company SpaceX. The rocket consists of a center core ...

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 problems ...

, especially applications in control,

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, Scalar potential, potential fields, Seismic tomograph ...

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

, 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, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...

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'', 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, 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, implementat ...

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, multinational investment company. Founded in 1988, initially as an enterprise risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager ...

, 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 , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

, 1999 * John R. Ragazzini Award, 2003 * 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 IEEE- ...

, 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 Operations research () (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often s ...

Saul Gass Expository Writing Award * SIAM Fellow, 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 a ...

, 2017 * 2019 Athanasios Papoulis Award, EURASIP * Foreign Member, National Academy of Engineering of Korea (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 was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

, 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 soci ...

, 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 a major American publishing#Textbook_publishing, educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth cen ...

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

References

External links

*

Stephen P. Boyd executive profile
on Bloomberg.com {{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 American control theorists Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Fellows 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 BlackRock people