Panagiotis D. Grontas winner of IEEE CSS young author award

Panagiotis D. Grontas, G. Belgioioso, C. Cenedese, M. Fochesato, J. Lygeros, and F. Dörfler, “BIG Hype: Best Intervention in Games via Distributed Hypergradient Descent,” IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr., vol. 69, no. 12, pp. 8338–8353, Dec. 2024, doi: 10.1109/TAC.2024.3410890.

The Award Committee, chaired by Alireza Karimi, gave the following motivation: «This paper tackles a timely problem in hierarchical decision-making by introducing the first distributed algorithm for linear-quadratic equilibrium problems. It offers rigorous convergence guarantees via nonsmooth and monotone operator theory, addressing a key gap in the literature. The algorithm is scalable and privacy-preserving, built on decentralized convex optimization and distributed information exchange, making it well-suited for large-scale systems. The paper is exceptionally clear and well written, with broad applicability and strong relevance to both engineering and machine learning communities. It opens new theoretical and computational directions in distributed decision-making.»

Sponsorship of the MathWorks, which funded the award, is gratefully acknowledged.