WNCG researchers and alumni were selected as Best Paper Award Runners-up at this year’s ACM MobiHoc: International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing.
WCNG postdoctoral fellow Daniel Vial’s paper, “Robust Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandits,” was one of the papers selected as a runner-up. Co-written by Sanjay Shakkottai and R. Srikant, this paper develops algorithms for online collaborative learning in a setting where malicious agents might inject false information into the learning system.
Also recognized as a runner-up was WNCG student Yi Zhang and alumnus Soumya Basu’s paper, “MmWave Codebook Selection in Rapidly-Varying Channels via Multinomial Thompson Sampling.” Co-written with WNCG professors Sanjay Shakkottai and Robert Heath, the paper develops algorithms for codebook selection using online learning and adaptation in a millimeter wave communication system.
ACM MobiHoc focuses on addressing research challenges in future wireless and networked systems, cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, and machine learning for such systems. The Best Paper Award commends research on novel performance evaluation techniques, algorithms design, and foundations relating to these topics.
Only one winning paper and two runners-up were selected for the 2021 award.
Daniel Vial received the Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering Systems from Univ. of Michigan and the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Univ. of Iowa. His primary research interests are reinforcement learning and bandits (particularly in multi-agent settings) and network science (including graph mining, opinion dynamics, and random graphs). He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at WNCG supervised by Sanjay Shakkottai and R. Srikant (UIUC).
Yi Zhang is a Ph.D. student at UT Austin advised by Robert Heath and Sanjay Shakkottai. He received B.S./M.S. degrees from Xi'an Jiaotong University and an Engineer's degree from Ecole Centrale de Nantes. His research interests include wireless, networking, signal processing, reinforcement learning (DRL and bandit), mmWave, deep learning-based wireless communication, and wireless system prototyping.
Soumya Basu received the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a member of WNCG advised by Evdokia Nikolova and Sanjay Shakkottai. He is currently a software engineer at Google, Mountain View, where his research interest lies in the theory and practice of Online Learning for enhancing complex systems.