Exploring Multi-Agent Optimization

Since joining the ISE faculty in fall 2022, assistant professor Farzad Yousefian has received major funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for collaborative projects with Uday Shanbhag from Penn State. “Both projects are broadly related to my area of research on multi-agent optimization,” he says. “The motivation, the algorithms, and the applications are distinctly identified.”

As PI on the two-year $400,000 DOE grant, Yousefian will be focusing on the design and analysis of new computational methods for federated scientific machine learning. “It’s motivated by emerging applications in Big Tech and healthcare, where there is an increasing need for learning predictive models from heterogenous and privacy-sensitive datasets,” he explains. “Thus far, two new randomized algorithms for federated learning have been designed.”

Yousefian is a PI on the three-year $625,000 ONR collaborative project focused on the design and analysis of computational methods for solving challenging, large-scale hierarchical decision-making problems. “So far, we have designed several new methods and validated them numerically,” he says.