Keynote speaker
Nahum Shimkin (Technion)
Title: Blackwell's Approachability and No-regret Learning Algorithms
Abstract
The theory or approachability, introduced by Blackwell in 1956, provides fundamental results on guaranteed performance regions in repeated games with vector-valued payoffs. These results, which have been applied in theoretical work on learning in games, have recently been the subject of renewed interest in the machine learning community due to their close connection with on-line learning algorithms. In this lecture, we will first review the basic approachability framework, outline its inter-connection with no-regret learning, and describe some applications to routing and scheduling. We will then describe some advances that include to new approachability algorithms, and their application to generalized no-regret problems.
Biography
Nahum Shimkin is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, which he jointed in 1995. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion in 1991, was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota during 1992-93, and subsequently spent a couple of years as a senior research engineer in the Israeli defense industry. He has served on the editorial board of several major journals including the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, and Mathematics of Operatiions Research. In 2008-11 was the President of the Israeli Association for Automatic Control. His research interests span several topics related to decision making in stochastic and multi-agent systems, which include: competitive routing and scheduling, reinforcement learning and bandit processes, control and game-theoretic analysis of queueing systems, approachability theory and on-line learning, and trajectory planning algorithms.
Plenary speaker
Merouane Debbah (Supelec/Huawei)
Title: Scientific Challenges of 5G
Abstract
The evolution of cellular networks is driven by the dream of ubiquitous wireless connectivity: Any data service is instantly accessible everywhere. With each generation of cellular networks, we have moved closer to this wireless dream; first by delivering wireless access to voice communications, then by providing wireless data services, and recently by delivering a WiFi-like experience with wide-area coverage and user mobility management. The support for high data rates has been the main objective in recent years, as seen from the academic focus on sum-rate optimization and the efforts from standardization bodies to meet the peak rate requirements specified in IMT-Advanced. In contrast, a variety of metrics/objectives are put forward in the technological preparations for 5G networks: higher peak rates, improved coverage with uniform user experience, higher reliability and lower latency, better energy efficiency, lower-cost user devices and services, better scalability with number of devices, etc. These multiple objectives are coupled, often in a conflicting manner such that improvements in one objective lead to degradation in the other objectives. Hence, the design of future networks calls for new optimization tools that properly handle the existence and tradeoffs between multiple objectives.
Biography
Mérouane Debbah entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France) in 1996 where he received his M.Sc and Ph.D. degrees respectively. He worked for Motorola Labs (Saclay, France) from 1999-2002 and the Vienna Research Center for Telecommunications (Vienna, Austria) until 2003. From 2003 to 2007, he joined the Mobile Communications department of the Institut Eurecom (Sophia Antipolis, France) as an Assistant Professor. Since 2007, he is a Full Professor at Supelec (Gif-sur-Yvette, France). From 2007 to 2014, he was director of the Alcatel-Lucent Chair on Flexible Radio. Since 2014, he is Vice-President of the Huawei France R&D center and director of the Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab. His research interests are in information theory, signal processing and wireless communications. He is a senior area editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and an Associate Editor in Chief of the journal Random Matrix: Theory and Applications. Mérouane Debbah is a recipient of the ERC grant MORE (Advanced Mathematical Tools for Complex Network Engineering). He is a WWRF fellow and a member of the academic senate of Paris-Saclay. He is the recipient of the Mario Boella award in 2005, the 2007 IEEE GLOBECOM best paper award, the Wi-Opt 2009 best paper award, the 2010 Newcom++ best paper award, the WUN CogCom Best Paper 2012 and 2013 Award, the 2014 WCNC best paper award as well as the Valuetools 2007, Valuetools 2008, CrownCom2009 , Valuetools 2012 and SAM 2014 best student paper awards. In 2011, he received the IEEE Glavieux Prize Award and in 2012, the Qualcomm Innovation Prize Award.
