Event
ECE Colloquium Series - Tian Lan, George Washington University
Friday, February 28, 2025
3:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building, Room 1110
Darcy Long
301 405 3114
dlong123@umd.edu
Speaker: Tian Lan, Professor, George Washington University
Talk Title: Multi-Agent Decision-Making in the Open World
Abstract: AI/ML has demonstrated tremendous success in many challenging tasks with superhuman performance. Many decision-making problems in the open world are too complex to be modeled as a monolithic single-agent problem and thus require the formulation of multi-agent decision making. In this talk, we present some recent research progress on multi-agent decision-making in the open world. We will discuss some key challenges in this space, such as the collaborative decision making, game-theoretical formulations, multi-agent skill discovery, partial observability, and the need for explainability, scalability, and human oversight/feedback. We will also demonstrate several applications of the results to real-world network infrastructures, such as datacenter resource reservation and 5G network management.
Bio: Tian Lan is a professor at the Department of ECE, George Washington University in DC and the Director of Human-centric Autonomy and Robotics (HART) lab. He received PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Princeton University. His research interests include machine learning, optimization, and relevant applications to networking and cyber security. The research is currently being supported by NSF, DARPA, ONR, ARO, USMA, Meta, and CISCO. He has received 6 best paper awards (e.g., IEEE Signal Processing Society, INFOCOM, Globecom, and Mobihoc), 6 industry research awards (from AT&T, CISCO, and META), as well as several faculty recognition and innovation awards. He is currently serving as a member of FCC Technological Advisory Council (TAC), INFOCOM 2026 TPC Chair, Fellow of National Quantum Lab at UMD (NQL), Distinguished Fellow at Center for Cyber Diplomacy and Leadership (CCDL), and Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
