Agentic Simulation for Emergency Department Operations
EDSim is a large language model simulation of an emergency department, with autonomous agents for patients, nurses, and physicians.
DENOS Lab, the Distributed Learning and Orchestration Lab at the University of Calgary
About the lab
The Distributed Learning and Orchestration (DENOS) Lab at the University of Calgary was founded in 2021 by Dr. Steve Drew, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering. We work on distributed learning, agentic simulation and reasoning, building intelligent and privacy-preserving systems that span cloud-edge infrastructures.
Join the lab
We are currently recruiting motivated PhD students in Agentic AI, distributed systems, and AI + Health. Prospective students should start their application by sending a CV with a list of publications to Dr. Drew at the email address on his university profile. Because of the volume of applications we receive, we will only consider candidates applying to the PhD program or planning to pursue a PhD after an MSc program.
Research
DENOS Lab pursues resilient and privacy-preserving systems for distributed learning, agentic simulation and reasoning. Six flagship directions anchor our current work.
Secure, Transactable, Agentic Health Data Sharing
STARFISH is a secure, interoperable framework for global health data sharing that lets individuals control their data while enabling compliant research.
Agentic Simulation for Wildfire Evacuations
AgentEvac is an agentic simulator for wildfire evacuations that couples SUMO traffic simulation with LLM-driven agents following the Protective Action Decision Model (PADM).
Wearable Stress Detection for Frontline Healthcare Workers
SENSE supports the emotional wellness of nurses and social workers, pairing wearable sensor data with machine learning to help frontline staff manage stress in real time.
Role-Aware Multi-Agent Grading of Clinical Summaries
LENS is a role-aware multi-agent pipeline that grades clinical summaries using open-weight LLMs.
Federated Learning for Edge Service Orchestration
As federated learning (FL) spreads across heterogeneous infrastructures, slow convergence drives excessive energy use on cloud and battery-powered edge devices. We design FL methods that budget clients by availability and carbon footprint and guide cloud-edge orchestration toward resilient, real-world deployment.
News
Sep 25, 2026
Patient-governed agentic health data exchange published in npj Health Systems
Dr. Steve Drew, Guojun Tang, Zainab Saad, and collaborators at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Weill Cornell Medicine set out STARFISH, a framework in which personal health AI agents negotiate, license, and get paid for health data on each patient's terms.
Read the story →
Sep 23, 2026
Dr. Steve Drew meets Canada's stablecoin builders at Solana Summit Canada 2026
At Solana Summit Canada 2026 in Toronto, Dr. Steve Drew met Kevin Zhang and the Loon team developing the CADC Canadian dollar stablecoin, Felipe Priuli of Tetra, which is developing CADD, and Marc Lijour of the IEEE Blockchain Technical Community.
Read the story →
Sep 15, 2026
Working with Calgary Emergency Medicine Data Lab to Showcase Our Research
Gerry Wu, Alexander Burn, and Samuel Wang joined the Calgary Emergency Medicine Data Lab, directed by Dr. Jessalyn Holodinsky, at the UCalgary Foothills Campus to show three systems the two labs are building together, the LENS role-aware multi-agent grader for clinical summaries, Priority-Conditioned Clinical Alignment, and the EDSim agentic simulator.
Read the story →
Aug 31, 2026
City St George's Professor Raj Rajarajan visits DENOS
Raj Rajarajan, Professor of Security Engineering and Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at City St George's, University of London, visited the University of Calgary and met Dr. Steve Drew at the Schulich School of Engineering to talk through research interests on both sides and future collaborations.
Read the story →
Aug 25, 2026
Starfish-FL paper published in ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
Starfish-FL: Harnessing Agentic Federated Analytics, by Yunkai Bao, Zainab Saad, Farhan Abbas, and collaborators, presents a multi-tier agent harness for cross-silo healthcare analytics in which the language model advises and deterministic guards decide. The open source framework ships 21 federated tasks in Python and R.
Read the story → View on GitHub →Paper Club
The paper club is a student-initiated reading group where DENOS Lab members take turns presenting a recent paper on distributed learning, agentic simulation and reasoning, and the group works through its ideas together. Each session is written up below.
Sep 18, 2026
Paper club opens with a session on coordination in multi-agent systems
Haniya Farhan opened the student-run paper club with three papers on how large language model agents coordinate, from the memory stream of Generative Agents to the SOP pipeline of MetaGPT and the search-based orchestration of HALO.
Read the recap →Team
Director
Dr. Steve Drew
Lab Director · Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Dr. Steve Drew leads the DENOS Lab. His research spans federated learning, edge computing, distributed systems, blockchain, and AI for health. He serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Internet of Things Journal and Neurocomputing.
Find Dr. Drew on Google Scholar and his UCalgary Profile.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Vincent Michalski
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Calgary
Dr. Vincent Michalski is a postdoctoral researcher in the DENOS Lab, working on representation learning and reasoning.
Find Vincent on Google Scholar.
PhD Students
Yunkai Bao
PhD Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Hossein KhademSohi
PhD Candidate in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Bart Maciszewski
PhD Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Musa Taib
PhD Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Guojun Tang
PhD Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Jiajun Wu
PhD Candidate in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Jialin Yang
PhD Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
MSc Students
David Anez
Master Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Alexander Burn
Master Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Zainab Saad
Master Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Zirui Wang
Master Student in Electrical and Software Engineering, University of Calgary
Undergraduate & Interns
Muhammad Ahmed
Mitacs GRI Summer Intern, 2026
Haniya Farhan
Mitacs GRI Summer Intern, 2026
Kostiantyn Ilnytskyi
Summer Intern, 2026
Hutton Ledingham
Summer Intern, 2025
Ruili Xu
Summer Intern, 2026
Alumni
Farhan Abbas
Summer Intern, 2026
Ali Abbasi
Master Student 2022 - 2024. PhD Student at the University of Southern California
Fan Dong
Master Student 2022 - 2024.
Isha Goyal
Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Intern, Summer 2026
Eldar Ibrahimov
Alberta Innovates High School Intern, Summer 2025
Axel Sanchez
Undergraduate Intern, University of Calgary
Leo Wei
Master Student 2023 - 2025. AI Technical Lead at Citizen Relations
Swaleh Zaidi
Summer Intern, 2025
Partnerships
We collaborate across disciplines and institutions to move our research into practice.
Publications
Selected work from DENOS Lab on federated learning, edge computing, trustworthy AI, and health informatics. The full and up-to-date list is on Google Scholar.
View all publications on Google Scholar
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ACM HEALTH
2026
Starfish-FL: Harnessing Agentic Federated Analytics
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npj Digital Medicine
2025
COLA-GLM: Collaborative one-shot and lossless algorithms of generalized linear models for decentralized observational healthcare data
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ACM CSUR
2024
Topology-aware Federated Learning in Edge Computing: A Comprehensive Survey
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IEEE ICC-W
2024
FedGreen: Carbon-aware Federated Learning with Model Size Adaptation
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IEEE ICC
2023
FedLE: Federated Learning Client Selection with Lifespan Extension for Edge IoT Networks
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AAAI
2023
USDNL: Uncertainty-based Single Dropout in Noisy Label Learning
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ICML
2022
Resilient and Communication Efficient Learning for Heterogeneous Federated Systems
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AAAI
2020
Shoreline: Data-Driven Threshold Estimation of the Online Reserves of Cryptocurrency Trading Platforms
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IEEE Blockchain
2018
Distributed Data Vending on Blockchain
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IEEE NetSoft
2018
EdgeChain: Blockchain-based Multi-vendor Mobile Edge Application Placement
Calendar
Statutory holidays and key dates for the 2026 academic year in Canada.
