Shuang Gao

Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
Polytechnique Montreal, GERAD
Google Scholar

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Polytechnique Montreal (engineering school affiliated with Université de Montréal), and a member of Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD). Before joining Polytechnique Montreal, I was a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University and a research fellow at the Simons Institute at University of California, Berkeley. I received my PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University with specialization in systems and control advised by Peter E. Caines.

My research aims to discover fundamental properties of dynamics and control of systems that involve large populations of network-coupled decision makers, and achieve intelligent decision-making for such systems.

Broadly, my research interests include control, game and learning theories for large networks, and their applications in social networks, epidemic networks, smart renewable energy grids and neuronal networks.

To Prospective Students

Recent News
  • 07/2024: Our course on "Network Models, Systems and Games (ELE6953KE)" will be open to undergraduates and graduates in Fall 2024. This course is suitable for students who want to have some exposure of research topics related to network systems and games.
  • 06/2024: Our NetSci2024 symposium on "Controlling Complex Networks: When Control Theory Meets Network Science", co-organized by Yang-Yu Liu, Aming Li, Erfan Nozari, Peter Caines and myself, will be held in Quebec City, Canada, on June 18, 2024.
  • 04/2024: I would like to thank NSERC (Canada) for supporting our research program on "Large Networks of Dynamic Populations with Stochasticity: Modelling, Control and Learning" through the NSERC Discovery grant.
  • 12/2023: I gave a talk on LQG Graphon Mean Field Games at the Simons Institue at UC Berkeley.
  • 06/2023: I will join the Electrical Engineering Department at Polytechnique Montréal as an assistant professor in September 2023.
  • 05/2023: Our journal paper on LQG Graphon Mean Field Games has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
  • 01/2023: I gave an invited talk (remotely) in the Department of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics in the College of Engineering at Peking University .
  • 12/2022: I gave two talks at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in Cancún: one on fixed-point centrality and the other on graphon mean field games. Slides are available here: [Talk1] [Talk2].
  • 11/2022: Two talks on Transmission Neural Networks: one talk in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research at UC Berkeley, and one talk at the 8th Annual Industry Day at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley.
  • 10/2022: I gave a talk on Transmission Neural Networks at the Workshop on Epidemics and Information Diffusion at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley [Video] [Slides].
  • 08/2022: Check out our work on Transmission Neural Networks: From Virus Spread Models to Neural Networks. A short presentation on this topic at the Simons Institute is now available online [Video].
  • 07/2022: Two papers are accepted by CDC 2022: one on fixed-point centrality and the other on infinite horizon LQG graphon mean field games. See [W1] [W2].
  • 02/2022: I received the Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship.
  • 10/2021: Recordings of our Workshop on Mean Field Games on Networks are now available online: [MFGNetRecording].
  • 10/2021: Our work on Optimal control of network-coupled subsystems is about to appear in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.
  • 07/2021: Two papers, one on LQG graphon mean field games and the other on opinion dynamics modeling, are accepted by CDC 2021. See [W1] [W2].
  • 02/2021: Our journal paper on Subspace decompositions for graphon LQR is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.
  • 02/2021: Check out the YouTube Channel for our Virtual Informal Systems Seminar!
  • 09/2020: Our journal paper on Linear Quadratic Graphon Field Games is about to appear in Communications in Information and Systems.
  • 11/2019: Our journal paper on Graphon Control of Large-Scale Networks of Linear Systems is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
  • 07/2019: Three papers on network control, graphon control, and spectral representations of graphon dynamical systems are accepted by CDC 2019. See [W1] [W2] [W3].
  • 05/2018: I received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at McGill University.
Contact Information

shuang [dot] gao [at] polymtl [dot] ca | +1 (514) 340-4711 ext. 7135
M-6023, Lassonde Pavilion, 2700 Chemin de la Tour, Montreal, QC, Canada, H3T 1J4
Campus Map| Homepage: Polytechnique Montreal GERAD