Florian Schäfer

prof_pic.jpg

S1317 CODA

756 W Peachtree St

Atlanta, GA 30332

I’m Florian Schäfer, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, I received my PhD in applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, working with Houman Owhadi. Before that, I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics at the University of Bonn.

My research interests lie at the interface of numerical computation, statistical inference, and competitive games. To learn more, have a look at these high-level summaries or the defense of my thesis.

I am currently hiring PhD students. If you have a strong background in computational mathematics and the above seems interesting (or you have a project in mind that I might find interesting), feel free to reach out!

news

Jun 19, 2024 Joint work with Jiong Chen and Mathieu Desbrun was selected for one of five best technical paper awards at SIGGRAPH ‘24! We use KL-optimal Cholesky factorization as a preconditioner to greatly accelerate the method of fundamental solutions.
May 10, 2024 Joint work with Yifan Chen and Houman Owhadi accepted at Mathematics of Computation. We use Cholesky by KL minimization to implement the GP approach to solving nonlinear PDEs at near-linear computational cost!
May 9, 2024 Joint work with Jiong Chen and Mathieu Desbrun accepted at SIGGRAPH2024. We use Cholesky by KL minimization as a preconditioner enabling highly efficient and scalable computation inversion of Green’s matrices arising in computer graphics.
May 4, 2024 I gave a talk at the Brown University Scientific Computing Seminar and had many great discussions during my visit. Thanks Brendan for hosting me!
Dec 28, 2023 Joint work with Spencer Bryngelson, Jessie Liu, and Ali Mani published at JCP. We use sparse LU recovery to improve the accuracy of the macroscopic forcing method by orders of magnitude!

selected publications

  1. Information geometric regularization of the barotropic Euler equation
    Ruijia Cao, and Florian Schäfer
    2023
    arXiv
  2. Sparse recovery of elliptic solvers from matrix-vector products
    Florian Schäfer, and Houman Owhadi
    SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 2024
    arXiv
  3. Sparse Cholesky factorization by Kullback-Leibler minimization
    Florian Schäfer, Matthias Katzfuss, and Houman Owhadi
    SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 2021
    arXiv
  4. Compression, inversion, and approximate PCA of dense kernel matrices at near-linear computational complexity
    Florian Schäfer, T. J. Sullivan, and Houman Owhadi
    Multiscale Model. Simul. 2021
    arXiv Blog
  5. Competitive gradient descent
    Florian Schäfer, and Anima Anandkumar
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2019
    arXiv Blog