Postdoc • Penn
ndf96@seas.upenn.edu
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where I work under the supervision of Prof. George Pappas.
I work at the interface of communication networks, controls and machine learning.
I study communication-efficient coordination in distributed and multi-agent systems and design protocols
that let agents do more with less information.
Recently, I have applied these ideas to environmental monitoring with marine robot teams,
an exciting and challenging real-world testbed.
Check out our recent project
on mapping the Douro river plume with underwater autonomous vehicles and multi-agent reinforcement learning.
I obtained my PhD from University of Padova, where I was advised by Prof. Luca Schenato and co-advised by Prof. Michele Rossi. During my PhD, my focus has been on studying the designs and properties of frameworks in which multiple agents cooperate to solve a machine learning (ML) or reinforcement learning (RL) problem by communicating with a central coordinator, in what is called the Federated Learning (FL) paradigm. Some of the research questions I tried to answer have been: can we get superlinear convergence in FL in a communication-efficient way? Is cooperation beneficial in federated RL when communication is subject to constraints? The typical fields of application of these studies are, for example, in large-scale distributed ML, FL over wireless networks, ML and RL algorithms trained from decentralized data at the network edge and 6G systems.
