Event
ECE Special Seminar - Cem Tekin, Bilkent University
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
2:00 p.m.
2328 A.V. Williams
Darcy Long
301 405 3114
dlong123@umd.edu
Speaker: Cem Tekin, Associate Professor, Bilkent University, Ankara, Türkiye
Title: From Satisficing to Cones: New Perspectives on Sequential Decision-Making and Beyond
Abstract: Sequential decision-making is integral to the development and deployment of modern AI systems, where decisions must often be made over time under uncertainty. Such problems arise in applications ranging from hyperparameter optimization and robotics to recommender systems and personalized medicine.
The first part of the talk presents a satisficing perspective on sequential decision-making. Instead of seeking an optimal action, satisficing algorithms aim to identify actions that meet a prescribed performance target. I will show how this principle leads to algorithms that can learn more efficiently while providing robustness guarantees under distribution shifts and adversarial perturbations. I will also discuss how similar principles can be used to improve robustness in gradient-based optimization.
The second part of the talk presents algorithms for identifying actions that trade off conflicting performance objectives for expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. These methods use preferences over objectives encoded by a polyhedral ordering cone to guide efficient search over the action set. I will present cone-based sample-complexity guarantees for these algorithms. Finally, I will introduce VOPy, an open-source Python library for black-box vector optimization.
Bio: Cem received the BS degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in 2008 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2013. Between 2013 and 2015, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently an Associate Professor at Bilkent University, Ankara, Türkiye. He received numerous awards, including the 2019 BAGEP Award, the 2023 Bilkent University Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2023 TUBA-GEBIP Award, and the 2024 TUBITAK Incentive Award. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Networking and has served as an Area Chair for AISTATS, ICML, and NeurIPS.
