Wotao Yin is Director of the Decision Intelligence Lab with Alibaba Group (US), Damo Academy, and a former Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD in operations research from Columbia University in 2006. His numerous accolades include an NSF CAREER Award in 2008, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2009, a Morningside Gold Medal in 2016, and a Damo Award and Egon Balas Prize in 2021. He invented fast algorithms for sparse optimization, image processing, and large-scale distributed optimization problems, and is among the top 1 percent of cited researchers by Clarivate Analytics. His research interests include computational optimization and its applications in signal processing, machine learning, and other data science problems.