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Leandros Tassiulas

Leandros Tassiulas 2020 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award

YINS
June 8, 2020

ACM SIGMETRICS is pleased to announce the selection of Dr. Leandros Tassiulas of Yale University as the recipient of the 2020 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award in recognition of his influential contributions to the foundations of network control and optimization with applications in computer and communication networks.  

Dr. Tassiulas is John C Malone Professor of Electrical Engineering at Yale University and member of the Yale Institute for Network Science since 2014. He received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki in 1987 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1991. He held faculty positions at the Polytechnic University of New York, University of Maryland and University of Thessaly, Greece.  

His research interests are in the field of computer and communication networks with emphasis on fundamental mathematical models and algorithms of complex networks, architectures and protocols of wireless systems, sensor networks, novel internet architectures, network economics and experimental platforms for network research. He pioneered the use of Lyapunov stability analysis for network control design and optimization. Based on this approach he proposed the max-weight scheduling algorithm and the back-pressure network control policy, as well as opportunistic scheduling in wireless. These advances influenced the design of internet switches, cross-layer architectures in wireless networks, resource allocation in cloud computing and more recently logistics and modern approaches to vehicular transport networks. Other notable contributions include the maximum lifetime approach for wireless network energy management, and the consideration of joint access control and antenna transmission management in multiple antenna wireless systems. He co-authored the book Resource allocation and cross-layer control in wireless networks (Now publishers 2006).  

Dr. Tassiulas has received numerous honors for his work over the years including the IEEE Kobayashi Award for Computer Communication (2016), the IEEE INFOCOM achievement award (2007) and several best paper awards.

Additional information is available on his website: https://seas.yale.edu/faculty-research/faculty-directory/leandros-tassiulas

External link: 

Electrical Engineering Seminar

“The Emu Migratory Thread Architecture”

Speaker: Marty Deneroff 
Chief Operating Officer, Emu Technology

Event time: 
Thursday, October 31, 2019 - 4:00pm
Event Type: 
Weekly Seminar
Location: 
Arthur K. Watson Hall, Room 200 See map

“Breaking the neural code with brain perturbations”

Speaker: Arash Afraz
Chief, Unit on Neurons, Circuits and Behavior (UNCB) 
National Institute of Mental Health

Event time: 
Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - 12:00pm
Event Type: 
Weekly Seminar
Location: 
Yale Institute for Network Science See map
17 Hillhouse Avenue, 3rd floor
New Haven, CT 06511

Network Science Special Seminar

Christoph Riedl
Associate Professor, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University
Visiting Fellow, Yale University

Event time: 
Friday, November 8, 2019 - 10:00am
Event Type: 
Speakers, Conferneces & Workshops
Location: 
Yale Institute for Network Science See map
17 Hillhouse Ave, 3rd floor
New Haven, CT 06511

“Computational Techniques for Nonlinear Optimization and Learning Problems” 

Speaker: Javad Lavaei
Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley

Event time: 
Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 12:00pm
Event Type: 
Weekly Seminar
Location: 
Yale Institute for Network Science See map
17 Hillhouse Avenue, 3rd floor
New Haven, CT 06511

“Deep Generative Models”

Speaker: Mario Lucic
Senior Research Scientist, Google Research (Brain Team)
 
Event time: 
Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Event Type: 
Weekly Seminar
Location: 
Yale Institute for Network Science See map
17 Hillhouse Ave, 3rd floor
New Haven, CT 06511

“Towards Massive Scale Deep Learning”

Speaker: Sanjiv Kumar
Distinguished Scientist at Google Research, NY

Event time: 
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Event Type: 
Weekly Seminar
Location: 
Yale Institute for Network Science See map
17 Hillhouse Avenue, 3rd floor
New Haven, CT 06511

“From classical statistics to modern machine learning”

Speaker: Mikhail Belkin
Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Statistics at the Ohio State University
 
Event time: 
Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - 12:00pm
Event Type: 
Weekly Seminar
Location: 
Yale Institute for Network Science See map
17 Hillhouse Avenue, 3rd floor
New Haven, CT 06824
Mehraveh Salehi

YINS PhD candidate Mehraveh Salehi wins the first inter-ivy thesis competition

YINS
May 24, 2019

Mehraveh Salehi has spent the last few years working on a thesis that combines neuroscience, statistics, and data science and challenges conventions in each of those fields. It also sheds light on longstanding mysteries of the human brain. Summarizing this work and its significance might seem a bit tricky. But allowed only three minutes and one image to do so, Salehi succinctly explained her work to a general audience at the first Ivy Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) last week, taking first prize.    

Ph.D. students from Yale, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Princeton University, and University of Pennsylvania (each won a smaller 3MT competition at their own university) competed at the April 25 event hosted by Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the United Nations.Yale’s participation in the event—the first time all the Ivy League schools have met up for the competition—was coordinated by several McDougal Offices, especially the Office of Career Strategy and the Graduate Writing Lab at the Poorvu Center.  

The rules of the competition are pretty strict. No props are allowed (although a laser pointer is provided if needed), and timing is important - taking more than three minutes earns an immediate disqualification. The judges included representatives from the United Nations, the Lincoln Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and McKinsey & Company. The event was the idea of Hyun Ja Shin, director of graduate and postdoctoral career services at Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, and Kelly Ahn, the associate dean of graduate student career development at Columbia.  

“We thought it would be a terrific way to showcase the fact that our Ph.D. students are not only excellent researchers but also skilled communicators, and are equipped for professional success in the workplace whether in academia or beyond,” Shin said.  

They pitched the idea to the other Ivy Schools, many of which already had their own 3-Minute Thesis events, and everyone agreed that some friendly inter-Ivy competition was a great idea.  

Salehi has been working for about five years on this research and had about six weeks to present it within the strict format. That meant spending a lot of time looking at her work from a broader perspective.  

“I ran it past friends working on other topics and asked them for feedback,” she said. “I wanted to be sure that I was as clear as I could be about what I’m doing. I finally wrote down the whole script, and there was a lot of timing myself and going through it again and again and again.”  

She also received help from the Office of Career Strategy and the Graduate Writing Lab at the Poorvu Center. There, she worked with Shin and Elena Kallestinova, assistant dean of the GSAS and director of the Graduate Writing Lab. In addition to these individual mentoring sessions, the Graduate Writing Lab offered a number of programs on presentation skills for the participants, including a series of workshops for developing oral communications skills and the Public Speaking Studio. Participants could use a software program in which they speak to a 3D-animated audience that reacts to their presentation. The software also provides instant personalized feedback on presentation delivery, from pacing to pitch to pausing, video replay, user-friendly analytics, and video tutorials. Kallestinova said the ability to succinctly explain your work is an extremely valuable skill.    

“It’s not actually about presenting your dissertation in three minutes, but about being able to explain the essence and the most important parts about your research within a very short period of time,” she said. “It’s a skill, like an elevator pitch, and it can be used everywhere.”    

The work paid off, as Salehi took first place among the 14 competitors. With her one slide (shown here, to the right) and three minutes, she engaged the judges and audience in her research (conducted in the labs of her two advisors: Amin Karbasi, assistant professor of electrical engineering & computer science and Todd Constable, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and of neurosurgery).  

Focusing on creating brain maps that spell out not just the differences between people, but the differences in one person’s brain from one state of mind to another, the research could potentially lead to a better understanding of how the brain makes the transition from one emotional state to another and new treatments for depression. In addition to being a Ph.D. candidate in the labs of both Constable and Karbasi, Salehi is also part of the Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS).  

Here’s an excerpt from Salehi’s presentation:  

“For my Ph.D. thesis, for the first time, I challenged my field’s long-standing assumption that there is a single brain map that works for everyone across time. I looked at brain images acquired by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI, and tried to understand what brain regions talk to each other and how this conversation changes as we engage in different tasks, such as playing a game or watching a movie. I developed an artificial intelligence technology to automatically translate these brain images into brain maps, like the ones you can see here. I applied this technology to brain images of 718 individuals and constructed their brain maps as they performed 8 different tasks.  

“To my surprise, I observed that these brain maps are unique to each individual, such that I could uniquely identify people with 99% accuracy just by looking at their brain maps! The brain maps are like fingerprints! I also discovered that these brain maps are not fixed, but they reliably reconfigure by task, such that I could predict what people are doing, with up to 97% accuracy, just by looking at their brain maps!”

External link: 
Nikolaos Papadis

Nikolaos Papadis is awarded the 2019 IBM PhD Fellowship

Emily Hau
October 11, 2019

YINS PhD candidate Nikolaos Papadis has been awarded the 2019 IBM PhD Fellowship. Nikolaos is an Electrical Engineering PhD candidate working with Professor Leandros Tassiulas, the John C. Malone Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department.  

IBM created the PhD Fellowship program in the 1950s to recognize and support outstanding graduate students. The IBM PhD Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional PhD students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation across academic disciplines and fields of study.  

Nikolaos’s research at YINS focuses on designing and building secure and scalable decentralized ecosystems for the sharing economy. He is interested in blockchain technology and networks, which have the potential to improve the way we interact with each other by enabling secure and trustless disintermediated collaboration. Nikolaos is studying the theory, mathematical modeling, scalability, security, and tradeoffs of blockchain protocols and networks, and in parallel investigating decentralized digital identity mechanisms as a tool for achieving privacy and data ownership in the sharing economy.  

His research exemplifies the interdisciplinarity of network science work at YINS, blending students and faculty from within computer science fields (e.g. distributed systems, cryptography, networking, security and privacy) and from outside of computer science, such as economics, law, and healthcare. The intersection of varied and multiple academic disciplines at YINS makes research more productive and dynamic.

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