Guannan Qu
Postdoctoral Scholar at California Institute of Technology
Contact: gqu [at] caltech.edu
Office: Annenberg 202, Caltech
About myself: I am a CMI and Resnick postdoc in the CMS Department of California Institute of Technology, working with Prof. Steven Low and Prof. Adam Wierman. I recently obtained my Ph.D. degree from Harvard SEAS working with Prof. Na Li. During Spring 2018, I was also affiliated with Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. I obtained my B.S. degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China in 2014.
Research Interest: I am broadly interested in control, optimization, and learning, particularly in networked systems like energy systems, IoT, cyber-physical systems, etc.
CV: can be downloaded here (last updated: Sept 2020).
Teaching: I was a co-instructor for CS/EE 146 (Control and optimization of networks) at Caltech. I was a teaching fellow for ES 158 (Feedback Systems: Analysis and Design) at Harvard.
Update:
- June 2020: Four new papers online! Two on RL for multi-agent networked systems (see here and here) and one on the intersection of model-based and model-free control (here); and one on learning-based DC-OPF (here).
- May 2020: Our paper on Q learning has been accepted to Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2020!
- March 2020: Our paper Scalable Reinforcement Learning of Localized Policies for Multi-Agent Networked Systems has been accepted to 2nd Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference as oral presentation (top 10%).
- February 2020. New paper online, Finite-Time Analysis of Asynchronous Stochastic Approximation and Q-learning.
- December 2019. New paper online, Scalable Reinforcement Learning of Localized Policies for Multi-Agent Networked Systems.
- November 2019. I received Simoudis Discovery Award, which is awarded to one project at Caltech each year at the interface of ML/AI and autonomy
- August 2019. I started my postdoc at Caltech under a joint CMI and Recnick Istitute Fellowship.
- August 2019. Two papers got accepted by Transactions on Automatic Control and Transactions on Power System respectively. Check them out here and here.
- May 2019. I defended my dissertation titled "Distributed Decision Making in Cyber-Physical Network Systems".
How to pronounce my name? "Guannan" is like Gwan-Nan, quite straightforward.
"Qu" is trickier, because the letter "Q" may be misleading. "Qu" is pronounced like "ch-yuu" - try to start with "ch" as in "choose" but end with "yuu".