Best Paper Award at ACM MobiHOC goes to ECE PhD student
A former PhD student with Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering won the Best Paper Award at the 22nd International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing (MobiHoc). The paper by Yihan Zou, entitled “Minimizing Age-of-Information in Heterogeneous Multi-Channel Systems: A New Partial-Index Approach,” was a collaboration with Kwang Taik Kim, Research Assistant Professor of Purdue ECE, and Zou’s two co-advisors: Xiaojun Lin, Professor of Purdue ECE, and Mung Chiang, Executive Vice President and the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering.
Zou says delivering fresh information updates is crucial for real-time robotic controls, data collection in internet-of-things, and financial applications, just to name a few examples. But, he says, existing state-of-the-art algorithms for optimizing information freshness is often restricted to systems with a single resource.
“There exist no efficient algorithms for optimizing information freshness when users share multiple heterogeneous resources,” says Zou. “In this work, we designed a novel algorithmic framework, called partial index, for scheduling information sources in a heterogeneous and multi-resource environment. The partial index approach significantly generalizes the classical Whittle’s index to multi-resource systems, making it possible to design, with a solid theoretical foundation, efficient and near-optimal scheduling algorithms in such context.”
Zou says this framework can potentially also be used by other large-scale decision problems where many agents compete for multiple heterogeneous resources to optimize time-sensitive goals.
ACM MobiHoc 2021 is one of the top conference venues dedicated to addressing challenges in dynamic networks and computing. It was held on July 26-29, 2021, both virtually and in Shanghai, China. This year’s Best Paper Award was selected from a total of 141 submissions.