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Gregory Dudek

Associate Academic Member
Full Professor and Research Director of Mobile Robotics Lab, McGill University, School of Computer Science
Vice President and Lab Head of AI Research, Samsung AI Center in Montréal

Biography

Gregory Dudek is a full professor at McGill University’s CIM which is linked to the School of Computer Science and Research Director of Mobile Robotics Lab. He is also the Lab Director and VP of research at Samsung AI Center Montreal and an Associate academic member at Mila - Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence.

Dudek has authored and co-authored over 300 research publications on a wide range of subjects, including visual object description, recognition, RF localization, robotic navigation and mapping, distributed system design, 5G telecommunications and biological perception.

He co-authored the book “Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics” (Cambridge University Press) with Michael Jenkin. He has chaired and been involved in numerous national and international conferences and professional activities concerned with robotics, machine sensing and computer vision.

Dudek’s research interests include perception for mobile robotics, navigation and position estimation, environment and shape modelling, computational vision and collaborative filtering.

Current Students

PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Postdoctorate - McGill University
Principal supervisor :

Publications

Accelerating Digital Twin Calibration with Warm-Start Bayesian Optimization
Abhisek Konar
Amal Feriani
Di Wu
Seowoo Jang
Digital twins are expected to play an important role in the widespread adaptation of AI-based networking solutions in the real world. The ca… (see more)libration of these virtual replicas is critical to ensure a trustworthy replication of the real environment. This work focuses on the input parameter calibration of radio access network (RAN) simulators using real network performance metrics as supervision signals. Usually, the RAN digital twin is considered a black-box function and each calibration problem is viewed as a standalone search problem. RAN simulators are slow and non-differentiable, often posing as the bottleneck in the execution time for these search problems. In this work, we aim to accelerate the search process by reducing the number of interactions with the simulator by leveraging RAN interactions from previous problems. We present a sequential Bayesian optimization framework that uses information from the past to warm-start the calibration process. Assuming that the network performance exhibits gradual and periodic changes, the stored information can be reused in future calibrations. We test our method across multiple physical sites over one week and show that using the proposed framework, we can obtain better calibration with a smaller number of interactions with the simulator during the search phase.
Adaptive Dynamic Programming for Energy-Efficient Base Station Cell Switching
Junliang Luo
Yi Tian Xu
Di Wu
M. Jenkin
Energy saving in wireless networks is growing in importance due to increasing demand for evolving new-gen cellular networks, environmental a… (see more)nd regulatory concerns, and potential energy crises arising from geopolitical tensions. In this work, we propose an approximate dynamic programming (ADP)-based method coupled with online optimization to switch on/off the cells of base stations to reduce network power consumption while maintaining adequate Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. We use a multilayer perceptron (MLP) given each state-action pair to predict the power consumption to approximate the value function in ADP for selecting the action with optimal expected power saved. To save the largest possible power consumption without deteriorating QoS, we include another MLP to predict QoS and a long short-term memory (LSTM) for predicting handovers, incorporated into an online optimization algorithm producing an adaptive QoS threshold for filtering cell switching actions based on the overall QoS history. The performance of the method is evaluated using a practical network simulator with various real-world scenarios with dynamic traffic patterns.
Anomaly Detection for Scalable Task Grouping in Reinforcement Learning-based RAN Optimization
Jimmy Li
Igor Kozlov
Di Wu
The use of learning-based methods for optimizing cellular radio access networks (RAN) has received increasing attention in recent years. Thi… (see more)s coincides with a rapid increase in the number of cell sites worldwide, driven largely by dramatic growth in cellular network traffic. Training and maintaining learned models that work well across a large number of cell sites has thus become a pertinent problem. This paper proposes a scalable framework for constructing a reinforcement learning policy bank that can perform RAN optimization across a large number of cell sites with varying traffic patterns. Central to our framework is a novel application of anomaly detection techniques to assess the compatibility between sites (tasks) and the policy bank. This allows our framework to intelligently identify when a policy can be reused for a task, and when a new policy needs to be trained and added to the policy bank. Our results show that our approach to compatibility assessment leads to an efficient use of computational resources, by allowing us to construct a performant policy bank without exhaustively training on all tasks, which makes it applicable under real-world constraints.
Optimizing Energy Saving for Wireless Networks Via Offline Decision Transformer
Yi Tian Xu
Di Wu
M. Jenkin
Seowoo Jang
With the global aim of reducing carbon emissions, energy saving for communication systems has gained tremendous attention. Efficient energy-… (see more)saving solutions are not only required to accommodate the fast growth in communication demand but solutions are also challenged by the complex nature of the load dynamics. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods have shown promising performance for network optimization problems, such as base station energy saving. However, a major limitation of these methods is the requirement of online exploration of potential solutions using a high-fidelity simulator or the need to perform exploration in a real-world environment. We circumvent this issue by proposing an offline reinforcement learning energy saving (ORES) framework that allows us to learn an efficient control policy using previously collected data. We first deploy a behavior energy-saving policy on base stations and generate a set of interaction experiences. Then, using a robust deep offline reinforcement learning algorithm, we learn an energy-saving control policy based on the collected experiences. Results from experiments conducted on a diverse collection of communication scenarios with different behavior policies showcase the effectiveness of the proposed energy-saving algorithms.
PEOPLEx: PEdestrian Opportunistic Positioning LEveraging IMU, UWB, BLE and WiFi
Pierre-Yves Lajoie
Bobak H. Baghi
Sachini Herath
Francois Hogan
This paper advances the field of pedestrian localization by introducing a unifying framework for opportunistic positioning based on nonlinea… (see more)r factor graph optimization. While many existing approaches assume constant availability of one or multiple sensing signals, our methodology employs IMU-based pedestrian inertial navigation as the backbone for sensor fusion, opportunistically integrating Ultra-Wideband (UWB), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and WiFi signals when they are available in the environment. The proposed PEOPLEx framework is designed to incorporate sensing data as it becomes available, operating without any prior knowledge about the environment (e.g. anchor locations, radio frequency maps, etc.). Our contributions are twofold: 1) we introduce an opportunistic multi-sensor and real-time pedestrian positioning framework fusing the available sensor measurements; 2) we develop novel factors for adaptive scaling and coarse loop closures, significantly improving the precision of indoor positioning. Experimental validation confirms that our approach achieves accurate localization estimates in real indoor scenarios using commercial smartphones.
Probabilistic Mobility Load Balancing for Multi-band 5G and Beyond Networks
Saria Al Lahham
Di Wu
Ekram Hossain
Imitation Learning from Observation through Optimal Transport
Wei-Di Chang
Scott Fujimoto
CARTIER: Cartographic lAnguage Reasoning Targeted at Instruction Execution for Robots
Nikhil Kakodkar
Dmitriy Rivkin
Bobak H. Baghi
Francois Hogan
A Neural-Evolutionary Algorithm for Autonomous Transit Network Design
Andrew Holliday
Learning Heuristics for Transit Network Design and Improvement with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Andrew Holliday
A. El-geneidy
Constrained Robotic Navigation on Preferred Terrains Using LLMs and Speech Instruction: Exploiting the Power of Adverbs
Faraz Lotfi
Farnoosh Faraji
Nikhil Kakodkar
Travis Manderson
A comparison of RL-based and PID controllers for 6-DOF swimming robots: hybrid underwater object tracking
Faraz Lotfi
Khalil Virji
Nicholas Dudek