Jia (Kevin) Liu,

Faculty

Jia (Kevin) Liu, Principal Investigator Associate Professor, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University Contact Information Office: 620 Dreese Laboratories, 2015 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH 43210; Tel: 614-247-4588; Email: liu@ece.osu.edu.

Postdoctoral Scholars

	Ziyue Luo 11/2022 -- Present, jointly supervised with Prof. Ness Shroff, Ph.D. in CS, The University of Hong Kong Research Interests: Network Optimization for Machine Learning.
	Myeung Suk Oh 09/2024 -- Present, Ph.D. in ECE, Purdue University Research Interests: AI and Machine Learning for Network Optimization.

Ph.D. Students

	Peiwen Qiu 08/2021 -- Present Research Interests: Optimization theory and algorithms for meta learning and bilevel optimization. Awards and Honors: Receipient of the ACM MobiHoc 2023 Student Travel Grant Award sponsored by NSF, the IEEE INFOCOM 2023 Student Travel Grant Award sponsored by IEEE ComSoc, and a MMLS'24 Best Poster Award.
	Zhen Qin 08/2023 -- Present (Co-advised with Prof. Yingbin Liang in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at OSU) Research Interests: Optimization theory and algorithms for meta learning.
	Yingchao Zhou 08/2021 -- Present (Co-advised with Prof. Zhengyuan Zhu in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University) Research Interests: Online statistical learning; Multi-armed banditis; Reinforcement learning.
	Zhiyao Zhang 08/2024 -- Present Research Interests: Online learning, multi-armed bandit, and reninforcement learning.
	Srijith Nair 08/2024 -- Present Research Interests: Optimization theory and algorithms for machine learning.
	Mian Wu 05/2025 -- Present Research Interests: Computer vision, large language models, federated learning optimization algorithms.
	Jingjuan Huang 08/2025 -- Present Research Interests:Multi-agent and multi-objective reinforcement learning.

M.S. Students

Chenzhuo Dong 01/2025 -- Present Research Interests: Network optimization for distributed machine learning systems.

B.S. Students

Michael Lin 05/2023 -- Present Research Interests: Federated learning for large foundation models.

Ph.D. Students

	Xin Zhang, Ph.D. Dec. 2020 10/2017 -- 12/2020 (Co-advised with Prof. Zhengyuan Zhu, Dept. of Statistics at ISU). Employment: Research Scientist at Meta. Research Interests: Communication-efficient, private, and secure optimization for distributed machine learning Awards and Honors: The Holly C. and E. Beth Fryer Award in Statistics in 2018 (award for the top Ph.D. student) and the Vince Sposito Statistical Computing Award in the Dept. of Statistics at ISU in 2020; and ICML 2022 Long Oral Presentation.
	Wenbo Ren, Ph.D. Jun. 2021 08/2016 -- 06/2021 (Co-advised with Prof. Ness B. Shroff in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at OSU), Employment: Research Scientist at Meta. Research Interests: Online statistical learning; Multi-armed bandits; Preference learning under incomplete and stochastic information; Differential privacy in online statistical learning.
	Menglu Yu, Ph.D. Apr. 2022 08/2018 -- 04/2022, Employment: Research Scientist at Meta. Research Interests: Resource scheduling and network optimization for distributed machine learning systems. Awards and Honors: Recipient of Teaching Excellence Award in the Dept. of Computer Science at Iowa State University in 2020. Receipient of Student Conference Award for IEEE INFOCOM 2021 by NSF and IEEE INFCOM 2022 by IEEE ComSoc.
	Ye Tian, Ph.D. May 2022 08/2018 -- 05/2022, Employment: Research Scientist at Meta. Research Interests: Sharing economy; Ride-sharing systems scheduling and routing optimization problems.
	Minghong Fang, Ph.D. May 2022 09/2017 -- 05/2022, Employment: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Louisville. Research Interests: Security of recommender systems; Security of crowd-sensing systems; Resource-efficient blockchains. Awards and Honors: Recipient of the Research Excellence Award in the Dept. of Computer Science at Iowa State University in 2020. Receipient of Student Scholarship of ACM TheWebConf (WWW) 2021.
	Haibo Yang, Ph.D. May 2023 08/2018 -- 05/2023, Employment: Assistant Professor, Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology. Research Interests: Robust, secured, and communication-efficient optimization algorithms for distributed and federated learning. Awards and Honors: ICML 2022 Long Oral Presentation (long oral presentation rate: 2%, acceptance rate: 21.9%). Receipient of the NeurIPS 2022 Scholar Award.
	Tianchen Zhou, Ph.D. Dec. 2023 08/2018 -- 12/2023. Employment: Applied Research Scientist at Amazon. Research Interests: Online statistical learning; Multi-armed bandits; Reinforcement learning; Multi-Objective Optimization. Awards and Honors: ICML 2021 Spotlight Presentation (spotlight rate: 5%, acceptance rate: 20.4%).
	Tianxiang Gao, Ph.D. Apr. 2024 08/2019 -- Present (Co-advised with Prof. Hongyang Gao in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University). Employment: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, DePaul University. Research Interests: Optimization theory for machine learning; Deep learning theory.
	Zhuqing Liu, Ph.D. May 2024 08/2019 -- 05/2024, Employment: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of North Texas. Research Interests: Robust and efficient distributed optimization for machine learning. Awards and Honors: ICLR 2024 Spotlight Presentation (spotlight rate: 5%, acceptance rate: 31%). Receipient of 2023 Dr. Burn Lin Travel Grant Award sponsored by the endowment from ECE Distinguished Alumnus Dr. Burn Lin.

Postdoctoral Scholars

	Prashant Khanduri 8/2020 -- 8/2022, jointly supervised with Prof. Mingyi Hong at the University of Minnesota, Ph.D. in EE, Syracuse University, Employment: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Wayne State University. Research Interests: Optimization theory and algorithms for machine learning, signal processing. Awards and Honors: Recipient of IEEE SPAWC 2019 Best Student Paper Award; Recipient of and All-University Doctoral Prize at Syracuse University; ICML 2022 Long Oral Presentation (long oral presentation rate: 2%, acceptance rate: 21.9%).
	FNU Hairi 10/2020 -- 07/2023, Ph.D. in ECE, Arizona State University, Employment: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. Research Interests: Reinforcement Learning Theory, Networking. Awards and Honors: ICLR 2022 Spotlight Presentation (spotlight rate: 5%, acceptance rate: 32%).

M.S. Students

	Zehua Li, M.S. Jul. 2019 09/2017 -- 07/2019. Employment: Software Engineer at Meta. Research Interests: Wireless network systems simulation and performance evaluation on the EMANE platform.
	Zhengxiong Yuan, M.S. Dec. 2020 08/2018 -- 12/2020. Employment: Software Engineer at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Research Interests: Age-of-information optimization for crowd-learning/sensing systems.
	Hamad Ullah, M.S. May 2022 01/2020 -- 05/2022 (co-advised with Prof. Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn in the Dept. of Computer Science at Iowa State University). Employment: Software Engneering, Haber Technologies. Research Interests: Wireless network systems simulation and performance evaluation on the EMANE platform.
	Zifan Zhang, M.S. May 2023. 08/2021 -- 05/2023. Next step: Ph.D. student in Computer Science, North Carolina State University. Research Interests: Wireless network systems optimization with multi-agent reinforcement learning.
	Jichao (Ciao) Yu, M.S. Apr. 2024 02/2023 -- 04/2024. Next step: Ph.D. student in Computer Science, University of Georgia. Research Interests: Federated learning, distributed optimization.
	Cedric Le Denmat, M.S. Dec. 2024 08/2023 -- 12/2024. Employment: Senior Machine Learning Engineer at The Walt Disney Company. Research Interests: Machine learning approaches for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems.

B.S. Students

John Wahlig, B.S. May 2020 09/2018 -- 05/2020. Next step: M.S. student in Computer Science at The University of Oxford, UK. Research Interests: Wireless network systems simulation and performance evaluation on the EMANE platform. Awards and Honors: Recipient of the 2020 Dean's High Impact Award for Undergraduate Research from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University.

Ph.D. Research and Academic Career Advices

• • You and Your Research [video] [Transcription] by Dr. Richard Hamming
  • PhD Research: Elements of Excellence by Prof. Ness B. Shroff, The Ohio State University
  • How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia Pre-PhD and Post-PhD by Prof. David Patterson, UC Berkeley
  • Do I really want a Ph.D.? What does a Ph.D. entail? (Section 2) by Prof. Mor Harchol-Balter, CMU
  • How to do good research by Prof. Eamonn Keogh, University of California, Riverside
  • Managing Your Career as a PhD by Prof. Deepa Kundur, University of Toronto
  • How to Read a Paper by Prof. Srinivasan Keshav, University of Waterloo

Academic/Mathematical Writing and LaTeX Tutorials

• • Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts
  • Ten Simple Rules for Mathematical Writing by Prof. Dimitri Bertsekas, MIT
  • The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
  • How To Write A Dissertation
  • The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2E by Tobias Oetiker
  • Using Imported Graphics in LaTeX2e by Keith Reckdahl

Collection of Probability and Statistics

• • Random -- Probability, Mathematical Statistics, Stochastic Processes (formerly Virtual Lab in Probability and Stastistics)
  • Bayesians and Frequentists -- Models, Assumptions, and Inferences by George Casella
  • Probability Net (About the foundations of probability theory)
  • Measure Theory by Terrence Tao (e-Book)
  • Random Processes for Engineers by Bruce Hajek (e-Book)
  • Markov Chain Monte Carlo, a course by Alistair Sinclair

Collection of Convex and Nonconvex Optimization

• • Provable Nonconvex Methods/Algorithms (for various types of nonconvex problems with benign structures)
  • Nonconvex? NP! (No Problem!) (Lecture notes by Ryan Tibshirani)