News & Awards

Upcoming and Recent Events:

November 2012 - Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks
The second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks will be held on November 8-9, 2012, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. It will bring together researchers from different communities working on information propagation and decision making in social networks to investigate both rigorous models that highlight capabilities and limitations of such networks as well as empirical and simulation studies of how people exchange information, influence each other, make decisions and develop social interactions.
June 2012 - Stochastic Networks Conference
The tenth international Conference on Stochastic Networks will be held on June 18-22, 2012, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. This week-long event continues a tradition that was started in 1987 and that has now become a bi-annual event. Its aim is to bring together researchers who share an interest in stochastic network models, to survey recent developments, and identify future research directions. As in the past, the meeting will be structured in a workshop format, with approximately twenty hour-long invited talks, and ample free time, so as to maximize interactions between speakers and participants, and to facilitate a fruitful exchange of ideas. In addition, there will be a poster session for contributed papers. Visit the conference website for more information.
June 2011 - Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks
The workshop brought together researchers from different communities working on information propagation and decision making in social networks to investigate both rigorous models that highlight capabilities and limitations of such networks as well as empirical and simulation studies of how people exchange information, influence each other, make decisions and develop social interactions. Visit the WIDS website for more information.
November 2009 - Paths Ahead in the Science of Information and Decision Systems
The Symposium, which was held November 12-14, 2009, was a smashing success, with 340 registrants, four outstanding and thought-provoking panel sessions, a plenary address by Sanjoy Mitter, a very enjoyable banquet which included a tour of the history of LIDS by Alan Willsky, and an energized and enthusiastic atmosphere. Articles and photos on the Symposium have appeared in several different IEEE Society magazines and newsletters. Visit the Paths Ahead website for videos and copies of the presentations.

News Makers & Award-Winners:

Prof. Devavrat Shah was named to the Advisory Board of Compass Labs on March 21, 2013.
Work co-authored by Prof. Alexandre Megretski, Principal Research Scientist Mardavij Roozbehani and LIDS Alum Eric Feron was featured in the March 19, 2013 MIT News Article Can Control Theory Make Software Better?
Work co-authored by Prof. Robert Berwick was featured on the MIT home page on Feb. 21, 2013 with the article How Human Language Could Have Evolved from Birdsong. This work was also covered by Science's on-line news in an article published on February 28, 2013.
Prof. Devavrat Shah was featured on the MIT home page on Feb. 7, 2013 with the article Networks of Probability.
LIDS Director Alan Willsky was invited to deliver this year's William Gould Dow Distinguished Lecture at the University of Michigan. This lectureship is the highest honor offered by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Prof. Willsky gave his Dow lecture on January 15.
LIDS Director Alan Willsky has been invited to be the Dean Lytle Electrical Engineering Endowed Lecturer at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Washington. Prof. Willsky will deliver both a technical lecture and a lecture for the entire UW campus on May 14 and 15. The Lytle lecture draws faculty and students from across the campus and from many of the local companies and research organizations.
Prof. Asuman Ozdaglar is the inaugural recipient of the Steven and Renee Finn Innovation Fellowship, in recognition of Asu's accomplishments and her research push into new areas of great potential. (Original announcement here.)
Prof. Pablo Parrilo is one of three recipients of the EECS Faculty Research and Innovation Fellowship. This is the second year of these awards, given to senior faculty members in recognition of outstanding research contributions and international leadership. (Original announcement here.)
LIDS graduate Kazutaka Takahashi and his co-authors recently received the Best Paper Award at the 2012 joint International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems at the International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems held in Kobe, Japan.
Research by Devavrat Shah and his student Stanislav Nikolov on predicting trending topics on Twitter is featured on the MIT homepage.
Amir Ali Ahmadi, Alex Olshevsky, Pablo Parrilo, and John Tsitsiklis have been awarded the 2012 INFORMS Computer Society Award, recognizing the significant contributions of three papers:
- Ahmadi, Olshevsky, Parrilo, and Tsitsiklis, "NP-hardness of deciding convexity of quartic polynomials and related problems", Mathematical Programming, 2011.
- Ahmadi and Parrilo, "A convex polynomial that is not sos-convex", Mathematical Programming, 2011.
- Ahmadi and Parrilo, "A complete characterization of the gap between convexity and sos-convexity", SIAM Journal on Optimization, 2012.
An article on LIDS alum Venkat Chandrasekaran is featured on CalTech's website.
Devavrat Shah has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with Tenure in the EECS Department, and Moe Win has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor in the AA Department.
Joong Bum Rhim has been awarded 1st Prize in the Student Paper Contest at the 7th IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM 2012) for "Benefits of collaboration and diversity in teams of categorically-thinking decision makers," by Joong Bum Rhim, Lav R. Varshney and Vivek K Goyal.
Amir Ali Ahmadi has received the prestigious IBM Herman Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences, for the years 2012-2013.
Ozan Candogan, a joint student of Asu Ozdaglar and Pablo Parrilo has been awarded the very prestigious Microsoft Fellowship.
Yuan Zhong,, co- advised by Devavrat Shah and John Tsitsiklis, has been received the Best Student Paper Award at Sigmetrics 2012 for the paper "Optimal Queue-Size Scaling in Switched Networks."
Venkat Chandrasekaran has received the EECS Department's Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize for his outstanding Ph.D. thesis in Electrical Engineering.
LIDS has received an unrestricted 50K gift from the Periodic Breathing Foundation. The gift was presented by Mr. Robert W. Daly, in memory of his late father, Dr. Richard T. Daly. The gift will be used to seed research on the subject of Sleep Apnea, under the supervision of Prof. John Tsitsiklis. Various forms of sleep apnea afflict millions of people, and the more severe forms are believed to have devastating health side effects. Some of the scientific challenges are to develop better dynamical models for this phenomenon, use them to control sleep apnea, as well as to learn more about this disease by mining patient data.
Watcharapan Suwansantisuk and Moe Win, together with Marco Chiani (University of Bologna), received the 2011 IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize for the paper “Frame Synchronization for Variable-Length Packets,” IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun., vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 52--69, Jan. 2008.
Prof. Vince Poor, member of our Advisory Committee and Dean at Princeton, will be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.
Prof. Vince Poor, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton and member of the LIDS Advisory Board, is the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Signal Processing Society's Society Award for "fundamental technical contributions to, and leadership in, statistical signal processing and its applications to wireless communications and related fields".
Dr. Henrique (Rico) Malvar - MIT EECS Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Research, Redmond, and member of LIDS Advisory Committee - has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Patrick Jaillet and his former student Michael Wagner are the winners of the 2010 Glover-Klingman Prize for the best paper published in the journal Networks during 2010 for their paper "Almost Sure Asymptotic Optimality for Online Routing and Machine Scheduling Problems" (published in Jan. 2010).
The work of Emilio Frazzoli and Sertac Karaman is featured on the MIT home page (archive here).
Pablo Parrilo is the recipient of the 2011 Antonio Ruberti Outstanding Young Researcher Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society. This award is to recognize distinguished cutting-edge contributions by a young researcher to the theory or application of systems and control. The awards ceremony took place at the 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Orlando, FL), in December 2011. The citation reads "For fundamental contributions to optimization theory and its applications."
David Gamarnik and his former student Dmitriy Katz (now at IBM Research) have received the Best Publication Award from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society for their THREE papers "On Deciding Stability of Constrained Homogeneous Random Walks and Queueing Systems," "On the Undecidability of Computing Stationary Distributions and Large Deviation Rates for Constrained Random Walks," and "On Deciding the Stability of Multiclass Queueing Networks Under Buffer Priority Scheduling Policies."
Yuan Shen, Santiago Mazuelas and Moe Win have been selected to receive the Best Paper Award at the 2011 IEEE Global Communications Conference for their paper "A Theoretical Foundation of Network Navigation."
The IEEE Board of Directors, at its November 2011 meeting, elevated Eytan Modiano to IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2012, with the following citation: "For contributions to cross-layer resource allocation algorithms for wireless, satellite, and optical networks".
Kuang Xu received the First Place prize in the 2011 INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition for his paper "On the Power of Centralization in Distributed Processing", based on his Masters thesis, supervised by Prof. John Tsitsiklis.
Myung Jin Choi is one of the winners of this year's George M. Sprowls Award, an award given to the best computer science theses at MIT.
An article on the MIT News website features research by Prof. Emilio Frazzoli and Sertac Karaman.
Munther Dahleh was named the Associate Department Head of EECS.
Pablo Parrilo became a Co-Associate Director of LIDS.
Dave Forney was awarded the 2011 Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society. The Wyner Award honors an individual who has shown outstanding leadership in, and provided long-standing, exceptional service to, the Information Theory community.
Yury Polyanskiy, who joined EECS and LIDS in August as an Assistant Professor won the 2011 Information Theory Society Prize Paper Award, jointly with his advisors H. Vincent Poor and Sergio Verdu, for their paper "Channel coding rate in the finite blocklength regime" in the May 2010 IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
Santiago Mazuelas, Yuan Shen, and Moe Win have received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (ICUWB) 2011 for their paper "Wideband Cooperative Localization via Belief Condensation."
The work of recent LIDS graduate Lav Varshney on low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is featured in an article on the MIT news site.
Work by research scientist Mardavij Roozbehani, and professors Sanjoy Mitter, and Munther Dahleh on the volatility of power grids under real-time pricing (pdf here) is covered in an article on the MIT news site.
Prof. Devavrat Shah and his students Srikanth Jagabathula and Ammar Ammar are featured in an article on the New York Times website.
The work of Tauhid Zaman appears in an article in the Technology Review.
Animashree Anadkumar, a former post doc of Alan Willsky, just received the SIGMETRICS 2011 Best Paper Award for her paper "Topology Discovery of Sparse Random Graphs With Few Participants".
Kuang Xu was awarded the first place Ernst Guillemin Award for Best Electrical Engineering SM thesis. Kuang's thesis, supervised by Prof. John Tsitsiklis, is entitled "On the Power of Centralization in Distributed Processing."
Kimon Drakopoulos was awarded the second place Ernst Guillemin Award for Best Electrical Engineering SM thesis. Kimon's thesis, cosupervised by Profs. Asu Ozdaglar and John Tsitsiklis, is entitled "Observational Learning with Finite Memory."
Vincent Tan received the Jin-Au Kong Award for Best Electrical Engineering Ph.D. thesis. The Award was announced at the EECS Spring Fling/Award Ceremony. Vincent's thesis, supervised by Prof. Alan Willsky, is entitled "Large Deviation Analysis and Applications of Learning Tree-Structured Graphical Models."
Sertac Karaman, a student of Prof. Emilio Frazzoli, is the winner of the 2011 AIAA Orville and Wilbur Wright Graduate Award.
The School of Engineering's Infinite Mile Award for 2011 was given to Jennifer Donovan for her exceptional service to LIDS.
Prof. Asuman Ozdaglar was selected as a 2011 Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.
Sertac Karaman was awarded a 2011 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship.
Former LIDS Ph.D. student, Dr. Dmitry Malioutov, former LIDS research scientist Dr. Mujdat Cetin, and Prof. Alan Willsky have been awarded the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for their paper, "A Sparse Signal Reconstruction Perspective for Source Localization with Sensor Arrays," which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
Dr. HanLim Choi (a lids alum and currently a professor at KAIST) and Prof. Jon How have won the Best Application Paper published in Automatica over the last three years, on the paper titled: "Continuous trajectory planning of mobile sensors for informative forecasting".
Prof. David Staelin was awarded the John Howard Dellinger Medal “for seminal contributions to the passive microwave remote sensing of planetary atmospheres and the development of remote sensing of the atmosphere and environment of the Earth from space" by the International Union of Radio Science (Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale)
Lav Varshney received Honorable Mention for the Jin-Au Kong Award for Best Electrical Engineering Ph.D. thesis. Lav's thesis, supervised by Prof. Vivek Goyal and Prof. Sanjoy Mitter, is entitled "Unreliable and Resource-Constrained Decoding".
The thesis work of LIDS alum Ilan Lobel and his advisors, Profs. Acemoglu, Dahleh, and Ozdaglar, on a model of information aggregation and possible herding in social networks is covered in an MIT News article.
The Marconi Society has named Yuan Shen as one of its 2010 Marconi Young Scholars. You can find the press release here. Yuan is a student of Prof. Moe Win and is currently working on wideband localization, cooperative networks, and ultrawide bandwidth communications.
One of the Sprowls Awards this year has been given to Jinwoo Shin. Jinwoo's thesis titled: Efficient Distributed Medium Access Algorithm (pdf here) was supervised by Prof. Devavrat Shah at LIDS. The Sprowls Awards are given every year for the best PhD theses in Computer Science at MIT.
An MIT News article titled "can you find me now" describes Prof. Moe Win and his group's research on the fundamental limits of wireless information in identifying locations.
An article titled "Sizing Samples" describing the work of Vincent Tan, Alan Willsky, and Animashree Anandkumar appears on the MIT News website.
Emily Fox, who finished her Ph.D. last August, received the EECS Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize. This is the inaugural awarding of what will be an annual award for the best Ph.D. thesis and is quite an honor.
The work of Prof. Pablo Parillo appears in an article on the MIT News website.
Myung Jin Choi's work appears in an article on the MIT News website.
Srikanth Jagabathula, a PhD student at LIDS who is jointly supervised by Devavrat Shah and Vivek Farias, received the MSOM student paper competition first prize during the 2010 NFORMS annual meeting for his paper titled "A New Approach to Modeling Choice".
Prof. Devavrat Shah has been announced as the recipient of the prestigious Erlang Prize at the 2010 INFORMS annual meeting.
The 2010 George Axelby Outstanding Paper Award has been awarded to Munther Dahleh and Nuno Martins for their paper "Feedback Control in the Presence of Noisy Channels: 'Bode-Like' Fundamental Limitations of Performance".
Prof. Pablo Parrilo is an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) for the section on Control Theory and Optimization.
Prof. Patrick Jaillet is the new co-holder of the Dugald C. Jackson Chair.
Prof. Emilio Frazzoli and Sertac Karaman have just received the Willow Garage's Best Open Source Code Award for RRT(*), a software library implementing the algorithms introduced and analyzed in their paper S. Karaman and E. Frazzoli: "Incremental Sampling-based Algorithms for Optimal Motion Planning", Robotics: Science and Systems, Zaragoza, Spain, 2010. The code and relevant documentation are at http://ares.lids.mit.edu/software/RRT(*).html
Prof. Eduardo Sontag has been selected as the recipient of the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Award for fundamental contributions to nonlinear systems theory and nonlinear feedback control.
Emily Fox has been awarded the EECS Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize.
An article on LIDS appears in the EECS Spring newsletter.
Emily Fox has been awarded the Savage Award for Applied Methodology in Bayesian Statistics. For more information, see http://www.bayesian.org/awards/Savage.html
Venkat Chandrasekaran's research is featured on the MIT News website.
Pablo Parrilo is featured on the MIT News website.
Alan Willsky has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Jon How has been named the next Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor, succeeding recently retired Professor Alan Epstein.
Patrick Jaillet has agreed to become Co-Director of the Operations Research Center.
Prof. Alan Willsky is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award. Alan will be presented with the award at the ICASSP in March 2010.

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