Industrial and systems engineering’s James Ostrowski was recently picked a bythe US Department of Energy’s Office of Science for its Early Career Research Program. He was selected for his research into complex algorithms.

In his work “Symmetric Convex Sets: Theory, Algorithms, and Application,” Ostrowski notes that the growth in use and improvement of algorithms has allowed computers to take on new roles in areas that require rapid decision making, such as transportation, but that some persistent quirks remain.

He theorizes that those problems all have something in common and should be approached with that in mind.

“By developing tools that exploit this symmetric structure, one will be able to easily solve optimization problems considered intractable and improve the computational speeds by orders of magnitude,” Ostrowski says in his abstract. “The challenge of solving optimization problems will thus be transformed by changing a large part of the work to one of seeking symmetry and then exploiting it.”

Awards are pending final negotiations between the researchers and the Department of Energy. The full list of winners and their abstracts can be found at the Office of Science.