Yao Ji

H. Milton Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow

H. Milton Stewart School of ISyE, Georgia Tech

Offline

🧗 Bouldering @ The Overlook Boulder + Fitness
🏃 Half Marathon 2:03:49 @ Monumental Half Marathon
💍 Wife of a talented ML engineer: Dr. Ruqi Bai
🐱 Mother of three naughty cats: Oreo, Dove, Doggy

About Me

I am an H. Milton Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Institute of Technology. My postdoctoral mentor is Prof. Guanghui (George) Lan.

I earned my Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University (2024). Prior to that, I received my B.S. (2016) and M.S. (2019) degrees in the School of Mathematic Science from Beijing Normal University.

Experience & Education

H. Milton Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow

Georgia Institute of Technology

Sep 2024 – Present

Research on parameter-free optimization, stochastic optimization, higher order optimization, variational inequality, reinforcement learning and its application in health care.

Ph.D. in Operation Research

Purdue University

Aug 2019 – Aug 2024

M.S. in Probability and Stochastic Process

Beijing Normal University

Sep 2016 – Jun 2019

B.S. in Mathematics and Statistics

Beijing Normal University

Sep 2012 – Jun 2016

Interests

Stochastic Optimization Higher Order Optimization Parameter-Free Optimization Variational Inequality Gradient Minimization Reinforcement Learning Reinforcement Learning in Health Care

Featured Publications

Yao Ji, Guanghui Lan (2026). Optimal Stochastic Auto-Conditioned Method. In preparation.

Yao Ji, Guanghui Lan (2025). High-Order Accumulative Regularization for Gradient Minimization in Convex Programming. arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03723.

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Yao Ji, Gesualdo Scutari, Ying Sun, Harsha Honnappa (2023). Distributed Sparse Regression via Penalization. Journal of Machine Learning Research.

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Yao Ji, Gesualdo Scutari, Ying Sun, Harsha Honnappa (2023). Distributed (ATC) Gradient Descent for High Dimension Sparse Regression. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

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Presentations