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, 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 safety-critical systems and networks that significantly impact environmental, social, and economic sustainability, such as electrical grids, transportation, and data centers. 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 primary research focus: developing mathematical and algorithmic tools with formal performance guarantees for decision-making under uncertainty and strategic behaviors.

Latest News

• Sept 2024: Two recent papers: (1) “Static Pricing for Online Selection Problem and its Variants” accepted to WINE 2024 and (2) “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 and Isaiah joined the lab as Research Assistants. Welcome!!

• Dec 2023: Kushagra received the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship. Congratulations!!

• Oct 2023: We have a new cohort of Ph.D. students – Vlad, Shuai and Kushagra. Welcome!!

• Sept 2023: Paper “Threshold Policies with Tight Guarantees for Online Selection with Convex Costs” accepted to WINE 2023.

• Jul 2023: Paper “Competitive Online Path-Aware Path Selection” accepted to IFIP Performance 2023.

• May 2023: John joined the lab as a summer undergrad research intern (NSERC USRA). Welcome!!

• Apr 2023: We have a new cohort of M.Sc. students – Shayan, Hasti and Kimia. Welcome!!

• Jan 2023: Hossein joined the lab as a M.Sc. student. Welcome!!

• Nov 2022: Xiaoqi gave an invited lecture, “Optimization & Decision-Making under Uncertainty,” at Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI).

• Sept 2022: Yanzhao joined the lab as a M.Sc. student. Welcome!!

• Aug 2022: Xiaoqi is now a Fellow of Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). We are proud to join the Amii family to play our part in making AI for good and for all!!

• Jul 2022: Xiaoqi presented our recent work, “Online Allocation with Convex Costs,” at C2E@HKUST.

• Jun 2022: Xiaoqi presented our recent work, “Online Allocation with Convex Costs,” at RSRG@Caltech.

• Jun 2022: Xiaoqi presented our recent work, “Online Selection with Convex Costs (slides),” at ACM MAMA 2022.

• May 2022: Our short paper “Online Selection with Convex Costs” was accepted by ACM MAMA 2022 - in conjunction with ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP Performance 2022.

• May 2022: Henry, Johnson, and Yanze joined the SODALab as summer undergraduate research interns. Welcome!!

• Apr 2022: New NSERC Discovery Grant, “A Unified Framework for Balancing Robustness, Effectiveness, and Fairness in Online Mechanism Design.”

• Feb 2022: Siyuan presented our recent work, “Online Search under Convex Costs,” at Reverse EXPO 2022 organized by AI4Society.

• July 2021: Siyuan joined the SODALab as a summer undergraduate research intern. Welcome!!

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. For more information, click here to subscribe to our lab events and annoucements.

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