Student Spotlight: Yingxi Li
September 26, 2023
Meet Yingxi Li, an incoming PhD student in MS&E.
HOMETOWN
Beijing, China
WHERE I LIVED PRIOR TO STANFORD
Luoyang, China
Worcester, Massachusetts
Ithaca, New York
ALMA MATER
Cornell University
DEGREE & MAJOR
BS in Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE)
RESEARCH THEMES MY WORK REPRESENTS
AI & Data Science
Academic and work experience
My interest in utilizing optimization and probabilistic tools to address real-world-application-driven problems was sparked during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic when I was a college freshman. At that time, Cornell was trying to make the daunting decision of whether to open the campus in fall 2020, and the decision was made based on a study conducted by a group of PhDs and professors in the Operations Research department.
The realization that what I study in my classes could directly contribute to significant real-world decision-making led me to seek opportunities for conducting undergraduate research, and I was fortunate to find such opportunities. I was able to model and make attempts to solve problems involving network routing, bike-sharing, and queueing. A chance to conduct research as a MS&E PhD student would give me more chances to learn, explore, and work with such problems, which is why I find myself drawn to this path.
Impact I hope to have in my field and the world
As of now, my interest lies in learning faster solvers for large-scaled combinatorial optimization problems and constrained optimization. Large-scaled combinatorial optimizations capture the discrete nature of many problems seen in life, and modern day problems can be so large as to be unsolvable. I am also interested in methods for modeling constraints. I am hoping to conduct research during my PhD career that could hopefully make some good contributions to the above areas.
Interests and hobbies
Theater, rock climbing, and music.