SQUALL Seminar - Igor Kadota
March 23, 2026 12:30PM—1:30PM
Location:
In Person
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Gates Hillman 7101
Speaker:
IGOR KADOTA,
Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Electrical and Computer EngineeringNorthwestern University
http://www.igorkadota.com/
Ensuring timely information delivery is essential for modern networked systems ranging from smart factories to autonomous vehicles. The Age of Information (AoI) has emerged as a key metric for quantifying information freshness, but most AoI‑aware scheduling algorithms rely on real‑time knowledge of source or destination timestamps. This assumption breaks down in practical systems with unreliable links, delayed feedback, or limited cross‑layer visibility.
This talk presents a framework for optimizing information freshness without knowing the actual AoI, focusing on networks where sources generate packets according to general renewal processes and where the base station (BS) observes only transmission outcomes. We develop low‑complexity MMSE estimators that infer both system time and AoI using only the BS’s observable history. Leveraging these estimators, we propose a Max‑Weight scheduling policy that operates without AoI knowledge, yet provably outperforms other well-known policies, including the Optimal Randomized Policy, in both theory and simulations.
Overall, the results highlight that freshness optimization is possible even when timestamps are unavailable, offering a path toward deployable AoI‑aware scheduling in real systems.
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Igor Kadota is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University. He received the Ph.D. degree from MIT LIDS and his B.Sc. degree from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA) in Brazil. His research is on modeling, analysis, optimization, and implementation of next-generation communication networks, with the emphasis on advanced wireless systems and time-sensitive applications.
He was a recipient of several research, teaching, and mentoring awards, including the Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2018, the Best Paper Award Finalist at ACM MobiHoc 2019, the Best Student Paper Award at WiOpt 2024 and WiOpt 2025, and the MIT School of Engineering Graduate Student Extraordinary Teaching and Mentoring Award of 2020. Additional information
Faculty Host: Mor Harchol-Balter
For More Information:
harchol@cs.cmu.edu