We are the Systems Optimization & Decision Analytics 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

• Feb 2025: Paper acceptance.

  • “Threshold Policies with Tight Guarantees for Online Selection with Convex Costs” accepted to ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation.
  • “Posted Price Mechanisms for Online Allocation with Diseconomies of Scale” accepted to WWW 2025.

• Jan 2025: Yanzhao successfully passed his thesis defense!!

• Jan 2025: Haoxin and Faraz joined the lab as PhD students. Welcome!!

• Dec 2024: Award annoucement.

  • Congratulations to Siyuan for receiving the Alberta Innovates Graduate Student Scholarship!!
  • Congratulations to Shuai and Vlad for receiving the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship!!

• Sept 2024: Paper acceptance.

  • “Static Pricing for Online Selection Problem and its Variants” accepted to WINE 2024
  • “Almost Free: Self-concordance in Natural Exponential Families and an Application to Bandits” accepted to NeurIPS 2024.

• June 2024: Two papers presented in ACM MAMA and LATA - in conjunction with ACM SIGMETRICS 2024.

• May 2024: Lyndon and John joined the lab as summer undergrad research interns. Welcome!!

• Feb 2024: Faraz joined the lab as Research Assistant. Welcome!!

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.

Contact Us