Bio: Shiqian Ma is a professor in Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from Columbia University. His main research areas are optimization and machine learning. His research is currently supported by ONR and NSF Grants from the DMS, CCF, and ECCS programs. Shiqian received the 2024 INFORMS Computing Society Prize and the 2024 SIAM Review SIGEST Award, among many other awards from both academia and industry. Shiqian is an Associate Editor of Journal of Machine Learning Research, Journal of Scientific Computing, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Pacific Journal of Optimization, and IISE Transactions, a Senior Area Chair of NeurIPS, an Area Chair of ICML, ICLR and AISTATS, and a Senior Program Committee of AAAI. He is a plenary speaker of the Texas Colloquium on Distributed Learning in 2023 and a semi-plenary speaker of the XVI International Conference on Stochastic Programming in 2023. Shiqian is the elected Secretary/Treasurer of the INFORMS Optimization Society in 2023-2025, and is the General Chair of the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference 2024.