DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR SERIES

Speaker: Bhaskar Krishnamachari, University of Southern California Title: Bandits and Newsvendors: Joint Online Learning and Optimization in Wireless Networks Date: Thursday, October 15, 2015 Time: 4:30pm Room: E-Quad, B205 Host: Mung Chiang

Abstract: Algorithms for online learning and decision-making under uncertainty have become popular in recent years to improve the performance of wireless networks in unknown dynamic environments. I will give a brief overview of certain classic problem formulations such as multi-armed bandits (MAB) and newsvendor problems, talk about their applications to wireless networking, and present some recent results from my group's research in this area. These include results for decentralized MAB, combinatorial MAB, contextual MAB, multi-period newsvendors, and optimized robotic network formation in unknown environments. This talk will cover joint work with students Dr. Yi Gai, Pranav Sarkar, Parisa Mansourifard, and Shangxing Wang, and faculty collaborators Rahul Jain, Tara Javidi, and Nora Ayanian.

Bio: Bhaskar Krishnamachari is an Associate Professor and Ming Hsieh Faculty Fellow in Electrical Engineering, and Director of the Autonomous Networks Research Group (http://anrg.usc.edu/ http://anrg.usc.edu/) at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. He works on the design and analysis of algorithms and protocols for next generation wireless networks. His co-authored papers have received best paper awards at IPSN (2004, 2010), MSWiM (2006) and MobiCom (2010), a best paper runner-up at SECON (2012), and a top-three paper at MSWiM (2014). He has received the NSF CAREER award (2004), the ASEE Terman Award (2010), and has been included on Technology Review Magazine's TR-35 list (2011), and Popular Science's Brilliant 10 list (2015). He has authored a book titled "Networking Wireless Sensors" published by Cambridge University Press. He is an Editor for the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, was the TPC Co-Chair for IPSN 2015, and is a TPC Co-Chair for WiOpt 2016.