Nouman Khan receives the Professor Pierre T. Kabamba Award

PhD student, Nouman Khan, has been awarded the Professor Pierre T. Kabamba Award for graduate student excellence in control systems. This award recognizes his dissertation work on “Sequential Decision Making in Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems with Constraints,” which he successfully defended on September 23, 2024.

“The decentralized stochastic control literature has primarily focused on scenarios where agents optimize a single long-term cost,” explains Khan. “My dissertation explores a more general setting in which a team of agents must minimize one long-term (objective) cost while ensuring multiple other long-term (constraint) costs remain within prescribed limits. This framework is essential in real-world applications such as communication networks, traffic management, energy-grid optimization, e-commerce pricing, and environmental monitoring. To address these challenges, my work studies a general mathematical model for sequential decision-making—a cooperative Multi-Agent Constrained Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (MA-C-POMDP).”

Khan has previously received a Rackham International Student Fellowship and the Richard and Eleanor Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement from the College of Engineering. As a graduate student, he has served as a Graduate Student Instructor for EECS 203 (Discrete Mathematics), EECS 301 (Probabilistic Methods in Engineering), EECS 562 (Non-linear Systems and Control), and SIADS 644 (Reinforcement Learning Algorithms). He has also been an active mentor, both informally and through the ECE BuddEE’s program.

Khan earned his BS in Electronic Engineering from the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan. At the University of Michigan, he received master’s degrees in ECE and Mathematics. Since July 2024, he has been working as an Applied Scientist at Amazon. He is advised by Prof. Vijay Subramanian and is set to graduate in Winter 2025.