We are the System-driven Optimization & Decision Algorithms Lab (SODALab) based in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) in Edmonton, Canada. Our research seeks to address uncertainty and strategic behaviors in systems modeling, optimization, learning, and decision-making, using tools and insights from computer science, economics, statistics, and operations research.

At SODALab, we view much of the modern world as systems of interacting, often self-interested, strategic agents who share and compete for limited resources amid varying dynamics and uncertainty. This perspective is particularly relevant to critical systems that significantly impact environmental, social, and economic sustainability, such as electrical grids, transportation, data centers, and the Internet. In these systems, complex interactions among multiple stakeholders are common, and ensuring robustness and resilience against unforeseen disruptions is essential. Moreover, public acceptance of unexplainable results in these contexts is generally low, if not intolerable. This drives our long-term research focus: developing a systematic framework for decision-making under various forms of uncertainty, with provable guarantees on key metrics such as efficiency, robustness, fairness, and risk.

Latest News

• May 2025: Member Highlights

  • Vlad received the Canada Graduate Scholarships – Doctoral (CGS D) Award. Congratuations!!

• April 2025: Paper Acceptance

  • “Cap-and-Penalize: Competitive Mechanisms for Multi-Phase Regularized Online Allocation” accepted to IJCAI 2025.
  • “Value-oblivious Secretaries with Advice” accepted to ACM SIGMETRICS 2025 – Workshop on LATA.

• April 2025: Student Milestones

  • April 24: Hasti successfully passed her thesis defense. Congratuations!!
    • Hasti’s MSc thesis: “Value-oblivious Secretaries with Advice.”
    • A two-page abstract of Hasti’s thesis appears in ACM SIGMETRICS 2025 – Workshop on LATA.
  • April 23: Kimia successfully passed her thesis defense. Congratuations!!
    • Kimia’s MSc thesis: “Multi-phase Regularized Online Allocation.”
  • April 17: Shayan successfully passed his thesis defense. Congratuations!!
    • Shayan’s MSc thesis: “Computational Complexity of Reinforcement Learning under Partial qπ-realizability.”
  • April 16: Hossein successfully passed his thesis defense. Congratuations!!
    • Hossein’s MSc thesis: “Randomized Posted Pricing and Rounding Schemes for Online Selection and Matching.”
    • Part of Hossein’s thesis is based on two published papers—in WWW’25 and WINE’24—joint work with Bo Sun and Raouf Boutaba.

• Mar 2025: Paper Acceptance

  • “Online Allocation with Multi-Class Arrivals: Group Fairness vs Individual Welfare” accepted to ACM SIGMETRICS 2025.

• Feb 2025: Paper Acceptance

  • “Threshold Policies with Tight Guarantees for Online Selection with Convex Costs” accepted to ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation. An earlier version of this paper was presented in WINE 2023.
  • “Posted Price Mechanisms for Online Allocation with Diseconomies of Scale” accepted to WWW 2025.

• Jan 2025: Student Milestones

  • Yanzhao successfully passed his thesis defense. Congratuations!!
    • Yanzhao’s MSc thesis: “Online Conversion under Horizon Uncertainty: From Competitive Analysis to Learning-Augmented Algorithms.”
    • The thesis is partially based on the paper: “Knowing When to Stop Matters: A Unified Framework for Online Conversion under Horizon Uncertainty.”

• Jan 2025: Member Highlights

  • Haoxin joined the lab as a PhD student. Welcome!!
    • Before starting his PhD, Haoxin received his MSc in Fundamental Mathematics from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2024) and B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from Harbin Institute of Technology (2021).
  • Faraz joined the lab as a PhD student. Welcome!!
    • Before starting his PhD, Faraz spent one-year as a RA with the SODALab. Before that, he received his MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Alberta (2023) and B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (2021).

More news…

Lab Events

The group meets weekly at the SODALab Seminar (in-person) and participates in various online reading groups. The SODALab Seminar is open to anyone who is interested in attending. Click here to view our past/upcoming schedules.

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