Sébastien Colla¶
News¶
- (September 2024) I have successfully defended my PhD thesis !
- S. Colla, “Computer-Aided Analysis of Decentralized Optimization Methods”,PhD thesis, UCLouvain 2024 [PDF ]
- (March 2024) MT180 Contest
- I had the chance to take part in the French-speaking science popularization contest “Ma thèse en 180 secondes”, during which I tried to best explain my subject and research results 📄🔎
Summing up 4 years of research in 3 minutes was quite a challenge ⏱
YouTube video.
Research Interests¶
- Decentralized Optimization
- Computer-aided worst-case analyses
- Multi-Agent system.
The goal of my thesis is to boost the research in decentralized optimization by creating tools allowing one to automatically compute the worst-case performance of any decentralized optimization algorithm, and to identify the bottleneck instances, providing insight on what limits the performance. This will contribute to a better understanding of decentralized optimization algorithms and enable rapid exploration of new algorithms ideas and their iterative improvement.
This project relies on the Performance Estimation Problem (PEP) approach developed by Adrien Taylor for classical centralized optimization during his thesis. It relies on formulating the evaluation of an algorithm worst-case performance as an optimization problem itself, whose variables are the objective functions and initial conditions. Such problems are very complex, but have been shown to be solvable exactly. The PESTO toolbox allows to write and solve them easily with Matlab. The equivalent Python toolbox, called PEPit, has been released in 2022.
Here is a Vulgarized Summary of my research project written in March 2021.