Alejandro Jofré

Professor Alejandro Jofré served as the prorector of Universidad de Chile from 2020 to 2022. He is currently an Associate Researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) and a Full Professor at the Department of Mathematical Engineering, University of Chile. He got a Ph.D. and Habilitation in Applied Mathematics in France in the 90s, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California. He has been a professor at the Universities of Paris 1-Sorbonne and the University of California, Davis, and an invited professor at several universities in the USA and Europe. He has a recognized research career with more than 80 publications in the areas of optimization, variational analysis, and economic equilibrium. He has led more than 40 research and industrial projects in optimization, big data and analytics, planning and geomechanics in mining, electricity pricing, power system behavior, energy markets, systems risk analysis, telecommunications and water pricing, sustainable production of natural resources such as copper and forestry. He has also directed a dozen of PhD theses. Prof. Jofré was director of CMM from 2011-2017 and deputy director from 2000-2010. He is associate editor of several mathematics and engineering journals and book series. Prof. Jofré is also one of the founders of PRISMA initiative in Art-Science-Technology, a project promoting research actions connecting Art and Science. He is currently a board member of the Center for Resilience to Natural Disasters and a member of the board of the National Center for Technology Pilots in Mining. He is also on the Advisory Committee of the Energy Center of the University of Chile. He was also a member of the Chilean Research Council from 2018 to 2019. Member of Advisory Board, Institute of Mathematics for Industry (IMI), Kyushu University, Japan (since 2015); Member of Scientific Committee, Research Center in Mathematical Modeling Ecuador (desde 2016); Secretary of the Mathematical Union of Latin America and the Caribbean (UMALCA) (since 2017); Member of Mathematical Council of the Americas (2016-2017). He has been recognized as a member of the distinguished Circle of the International Mathematical Union, a position he has held since 2016. In 2004, Prof. Jofre was elected Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. A few years ago, he was honored to be a plenary speaker at the prestigious SIAM International Congress on Applied Mathematics, which took place in California. In 2019, he received the award for the best paper, which he co-authored with his postdoc, at the World Conference on Stochastic Programming for their research on machine learning algorithms. Currently, he is one of the leaders at the Institute for Clean Technology (ITL), the largest R&D and innovation initiative ever allocated to a consortium of universities and companies in Chile, in the area of mining and energy. Prof. Jofré has founded a spin-off of the CMM in the area of Artificial Intelligence applied to banking systems, developing a platform for detecting financial money laundering, which is operating successfully at BancoEstado. Work is currently underway to scale up this platform in the Chilean and Latin American banking systems. In addition, he has been an advisor in the development of a multi-agent intelligent case law search engine, using cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence technology. Currently in operation at the Supreme Court of Chile, it allows for more in-depth searches and analysis of jurisprudence in more than 14 million cases.