Columbia University’s Electrical Engineering department is celebrating a remarkable achievement as Professor Javad Ghaderi and his PhD student Christos Tsanikidis receive the prestigious Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2024. Their paper, titled “Scheduling Stochastic Traffic With End-to-End Deadlines in Multi-hop Wireless Networks,” stood out among 1307 submissions, with only 256 accepted papers and just three honored with the Best Paper Award.
IEEE INFOCOM (IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications) is renowned as a leading conference in the realm of theoretical and systems research. The recognition of Prof. Ghaderi and Tsanikidis's work underscores its significant impact on the field.
The Award-Winning Research
Traditional networking protocols primarily focus on maximizing long-term throughput for message delivery. However, emerging applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), video streaming, augmented/virtual reality, real-time industrial remote control, and wireless real-time sensor data collection demand stringent delays and deadline guarantees. For these applications, messages received beyond their deadlines lose their utility and are often discarded.
Addressing this challenge, Prof. Ghaderi and Tsanikidis have developed innovative algorithms for routing and scheduling messages in networks with strict deadlines and operational constraints. “We have developed a new class of algorithms where routing and link activations are performed randomly but intelligently. These algorithms can achieve near-optimal performance while requiring a minimum network bandwidth that is logarithmic in the maximum length of a message’s route in the network (which is always less than the maximum deadline). I am honored that our results have been recognized by the INFOCOM Best Paper Award,” said Prof. Ghaderi.
About the Awardees
Javad Ghaderi
Javad Ghaderi is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. His research interests span Algorithms, Optimization, Stochastic Systems, and Machine Learning, with a focus on enhancing the efficiency of Communication Networks, Data Centers, and AI Systems. Prof. Ghaderi’s work has received Best Paper awards from several major conferences, including IEEE INFOCOM in 2020 and 2024, IFIP Performance 2020, and ACM CoNEXT 2016. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2017 and was a Best Student Paper Finalist at the American Control Conference (ACC) in 2013. Prof. Ghaderi currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and as TPC Co-Chair for ACM MobiHoc 2024.
Christos Tsanikidis
Christos Tsanikidis recently graduated with his PhD from Columbia and has embarked on a new role as a Quantitative Strategist at Morgan Stanley. His research has been featured in several leading conferences in networking and communications. In addition to the Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2024, Christos received a Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2020, a Student Travel Grant, and an NSF Conference Award. During his PhD, he completed an internship at Microsoft, focusing on the optimization of neural networks. Christos also served as a department ambassador and representative for the Electrical Engineering department, and as a journal reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Networking and IEEE Transactions on Communications.
The award-winning research by Prof. Javad Ghaderi and Christos Tsanikidis exemplifies the innovative spirit and academic excellence at Columbia’s Electrical Engineering department. Their contributions to optimizing network protocols for time-sensitive applications mark a significant advancement in the field, promising to impact various emerging technologies and industries.
