Hi, my name is Emiliano and I’m taking a course offered by the University of Melbourne called Discrete Optimization, it’s a two month online class offered through Coursera (amazing class, I highly recommend it); so I was wondering if it would be possible to access to an academic licence during the length of the course, which as an online student I don’t seem to qualify since the application form for CVX Professional doesn’t seem to like my Gmail address.
I know some companies offer this possibility, MathWorks for example grants student licences for selected courses during the length of the course (such as this one for this course); I’d personally be more than fine with something like that.
A final thought, please take into consideration that many of us who for a number of reasons don’t get the chance to attend degree-granting academic institution would still like to pursue our education.
Thanks for the note. First of all, note that CVX now supports a connection to GLPK, the free GNU Linear Programming Toolkit. So if you’re simply trying to solve mixed-integer or binary linear programs, you have a free option available today. You will have to install GLPK and the GLPKMEX Matlab connector yourself, however.
Secondly, please understand that it’s not enough for CVX Research alone to agree to offer academic licenses. After all, in order to use the license, you have to be able to connect to the underlying solvers MOSEK and/or Gurobi, so they must allow for such access as well.
That doesn’t mean an arrangement like this can’t be made. In fact, we were in talks with a previous MOOC to do this, but they ultimately decided it wasn’t necessary. I even had approval from the folks at MOSEK to include their solver in the offering. I remain grateful to them for their willingness, even though we did not end up moving forward with that.
It would, however, require a fair amount of extra work on the CVX licensing system to accomplish this. I cannot simply unlock the licensing system to anyone, I would need some way to verify participation in the MOOC, even if that’s just a list of email addresses supplied by the MOOC itself. I will be frank, I have limited time to spend on CVX; my paid contracts necessarily take priority.
Could you please just share where does CVX looks for the files (The MEX and the GLPK library)?
I couldn’t find anywhere on the solvers page in documentation any word on that.