About me
I'm a 4-th year PhD student in Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. I'm fortunate to be advised by Ziv Scully and work with Alexander Terenin, Peter Frazier, Raul Astudillo, and Su Jia. I am broadly interested in decision-making under uncertainty and stochastic control, with a current focus on adapting Gittins indices from Pandora's box problems and Markovian/Bayesian bandits to Bayesian optimization. I obtained my MS degree in transportation planning and engineering from NYU, where I spent two years of PhD study under the supervision of Li Jin, focusing on queuing control and its applications to intelligent transportation systems. Prior to that, I earned a B.Eng. degree in computer science from Yao Class, Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University.
Education
Cornell University
PhD in Operations Research
2021 -
New York University
MS in Transporation
2019 - 2021
Tsinghua University
B.Eng. in Computer Science
2015 - 2019
News
[2024/12/11] I gave a poster presentation at NeurIPS 2024.
[2024/12/4] I passed my A-exam (PhD dissertation proposal) at Cornell! Thanks to my committee members: Ziv Scully, Peter Frazier, and David Bindel.
[2024/10/23] I gave presentations at 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting.
[2024/9/25] My first-authored paper Cost-aware Bayesian optimization via the Pandora’s box Gittins index was accepted by NeurIPS 2024!
[2024/9/2] Our paper Cost-aware Bayesian optimization via the Pandora’s box Gittins index was selected as a Finalist by 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting Data Mining Society Best Paper Competition (General Track)!
Publications and preprints
Cost-aware Bayesian optimization via the Pandora’s box Gittins index.
Qian Xie, Raul Astudillo, Peter I. Frazier, Ziv Scully, Alexander Terenin.
NeurIPS 2024.
2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting Data Mining Society Best Paper Competition (General Track) Finalist.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Poster] [Code] [Page] [5-min Video @NeurIPS] [18-min Video @ECGI]
Smooth Non-Stationary Bandits.
Su Jia, Qian Xie, Nathan Kallus, Peter I. Frazier.
ICML 2023.
Major revision in Operations Research.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Code]
Cost-aware Defense for Parallel Server Systems against Reliability and Security Failures.
Qian Xie, Jiayi Wang, Li Jin.
Automatica.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Poster]
Stabilizing Queuing Networks with Model Data-Independent Control.
Qian Xie, Li Jin.
IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.
[Paper] [Presentation]
Empirical Validation of Network Learning with Taxi GPS Data from Wuhan, China.
Susan Jia Xu, Qian Xie, Joseph Y.J. Chow, Xintao Liu.
IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Poster] [Code]
Resilience of Dynamic Routing in the Face of Recurrent and Random Sensing Faults.
Qian Xie, Li Jin.
2020 American Control Conference (ACC 2020).
[Paper] [Presentation]
Student cluster competition 2017, team Tsinghua University: Reproducing vectorization of the tersoff multi-body potential on the Intel Skylake and NVIDIA Volta architectures.
Ka Cheong Jason Lau, Yuxuan Li, Lei Xie, Qian Xie, Beichen Li, Yu Chen, Guanyu Feng, Jiping Yu, Xinjian Yu, Miao Wang, Wentao Han, Jidong Zhai.
Parallel Computing.
A Game-based Data Collecting Framework for the Recommendation of Kids Second Language Learning.
Weizhi Ma, Min Zhang, Chenyu Zhang, Yixin Chen, Qian Xie, Weiyue Sun, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma.
KidRec 2017.
CCL 2017.
[Paper] [Poster]
Master's thesis
Robust and Secure Feedback Control For Queuing Networks. [Presentation]
Teaching (TA) experience
[Head TA] ORIE 3510/5510 & STSCI 3510 Introduction to Engineering Stochastic Processes I (Instructor: Ziv Scully, Spring 2024)
ORIE 3120 Practical Tools for Operations Research, Machine Learning and Data Science (Instructor: Peter I. Frazier, Spring 2023)
ENGRD 2700 Basic Engineering Probability and Statistics (Instructor: Jamol Pender, Fall 2022)
ORIE 5582 Monte Carlo Methods in Financial Engineering (Instructor: Sid Banerjee, Spring 2022)
ORIE 3510/5510 & STSCI 3510 Introduction to Engineering Stochastic Process I (Instructor: Jim Dai, Spring 2022)
Internship experience
Research scientist intern @Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Summer 2021)
Service
Reviewer of AISTATS 2025, NeurIPS 2024 Workshop BDU, NeurIPS 2024, AISTATS 2024, SIAM SIMODS, Transportation Science, The IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (TCNS)
Online talks coordinator (直播部部长) @OR China (运筹OR帷幄)
Women in ORIE Officer and Activity Planner @Cornell University ORGA (Operations Research Graduate Association)
Selected awards
INFORMS Annual Meeting Data Mining Society Best Paper Competition (General Track) finalist, 2024
ACM STOC TCS for All student travel award, 2023
ACM SIGMETRICS student travel award, 2023
Cornell University McMullen Fellowship, 2021
ACC student travel award, 2020
Silver medal in China Mathematical Olympiad (CMO), 2014
Gold medal (rank 6) in China Girls Mathematical Olympiad (CGMO), 2014
First prize (rank 9 in Guangdong Province) in China Mathematical Olympiad in Senior, 2011, 2013
Mischallenous
My hobbies include table tennis, traveling, and blogging. As a penholder, I won first places in the 2023 and the 2024 Cornell ORIE Table Tennis Tournament and the third place in the 2022 Cornell CSSA Women's Table Tennis Tournament! I am also a foodie. Feel free to ask me for recommendations on restaurants and attractions in the places I have been to!