We are the Systems Optimization & Decision Analytics Lab (SODALab) based at the Dept. of Computing Science, University of Alberta (UofA) and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), Edmonton, Canada. We are committed to optimizing decision-making in dynamic, uncertain, and possibly strategic environments, striving for theoretically-elegant and practically-relevant research based on tools and insights from computer science, economics, and operations research.

In the SODALab, we view much of the modern world as systems of interacting and possibly self-interested, strategic agents (e.g., humans, robots, etc.), sharing and competing for limited resources under different forms of dynamics and uncertainty. This is particularly true for large-scale platforms and markets in energy grids, shared mobility, E-commerce, Internet advertising, and cloud computing, where complex interactions among multiple stakeholders are ubiquitous, robust performance against uncertainty is crucial (e.g., intermittency of renewable energy such as wind and solar), and unexplainable results are generally considered unacceptable, if not utterly intolerable. This motivates the main theme of our research in the SODALab—to develop new algorithmic and computational tools, with formal guarantees on performance, robustness, and explainability, for optimization and decision-making under uncertainty.

Latest News

• 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 the Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2023).

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

• May 2023: John joined the lab as an 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 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 an undergraduate research intern. Welcome!!

Lab Events

The group meets weekly on Tuesdays from 1pm-2:30pm (MT) at CSC 2-49 (in-person only). There may be occasions when the group meeting will be conducted virtually, and the schedule may be adjusted to better accommodate invited speakers or other circumstances.

Our group meeting is open to anyone who is interested in attending. Click here to view our past/upcoming schedules and information on how to join us. For more information, click here to subscribe to our lab events and annoucements.

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