Stochastic Systems, Games, and Control Workshop
A Celebration for Professor Tamer Başar
13-14 July 2026
Bilkent University | Ankara, Turkey
Mithat Çoruh Amfi
About the Workshop
Join us at Bilkent University for a two-day workshop celebrating the birthday of Professor Tamer Başar. The event will feature presentations from distinguished colleagues and friends in the fields of stochastic systems, games, and control.
Featured Speakers
 Tansu Alpcan University of Melbourne |
 Gökçe Dayanıklı University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
 Seyed Rasoul Etesami University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
 Ali Kara Florida State University |
 S. Serdar Kozat Bilkent University |
 Quanyan Zhu New York University |
 Jun Moon Hanyang University |
 Ömer Morgül Bilkent University |
 Hitay Özbay Bilkent University |
 Mete Soner Princeton University |
 Şennur Ulukuş University of Maryland |
 Atilla Yılmaz Temple University |
 Kaiqing Zhang University of Maryland |
Program
| July 13, 2026 (Monday) | ||
| 8:45 – 9:00 | Opening Remarks | |
| 9:00 – 9:50 | Tansu Alpcan | Network Security: A Decision and Game-Theoretic Approach |
| 9:50 – 10:40 | Quanyan Zhu | Metamorphoses of Stackelberg Games: A Cornerstone for Signaling, Persuasion, and Multi-Resolution Decision-Making |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | BREAK | |
| 11:00 – 11:50 | Şennur Ulukuş | Timely Remote (Re)source Monitoring and Utilization |
| 11:50 – 12:40 | Seyed Rasoul Etesami | Game-Theoretic Decompositions for Distributed Data Placement over Networks |
| 12:40 – 14:00 | LUNCH | |
| 14:00 – 14:50 | Ali Kara | Learning with Function Approximation in Non-Markovian Environments with Applications to Partial Observations and Correlated Noise |
| 14:50 – 15:40 | Hitay Özbay | Robust Control of Distributed Parameter Systems |
| 15:40 – 16:00 | BREAK | |
| 16:00 – 16:50 | Jun Moon | Recent Results on Stochastic Optimal Control with Recursive Utilities |
| 16:50 – 17:40 | S. Serdar Kozat | Planning and Control with LLMs |
| 18:00 – 20:00 | DINNER | |
| July 14, 2026 (Tuesday) | ||
| 8:30 – 9:20 | Gökçe Dayanıklı | Cooperation, Competition, and Common Pool Resources in Mean Field Games and Extensions with Inverse Learning |
| 9:20 – 10:10 | Mete Soner | Learning Algorithms for Mean Field Optimal Control |
| 10:10 – 10:40 | Ömer Morgül | Observer Based Friction Estimation and Control in Simple Mechanical Systems |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | BREAK | |
| 11:00 – 11:50 | Atilla Yılmaz | Homogenization of nonconvex Hamilton-Jacobi equations in stationary ergodic media |
| 11:50 – 12:40 | Kaiqing Zhang | Policy Optimization for Some Nonclassical Stochastic Control Problems |
Organization Committee
 Gürdal Arslan University of Hawaii at Manoa |
 Melih Baştopcu Bilkent University |
 Sinan Gezici Bilkent University |
 Naci Saldı Bilkent University |
 Muhammed Ömer Sayın Bilkent University |
 Serdar Yüksel Queen’s University |
Sponsors
