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.
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, sustainable, and privacy-preserving systems that span cloud-edge infrastructures.
Much of our work puts large language model agents to work on real problems in health and public safety. We build multi-agent systems that simulate emergency department operations, grade clinical summaries, share health data under verifiable consent, and model wildfire evacuations. In parallel, we design federated learning methods that keep cloud-edge services resilient and carbon-aware while protecting sensitive data.
We focus on moving from theory to deployment, with methods that stay trustworthy and reproducible, minimize energy and carbon footprint, and hold up at scale. Our work has earned a Best Paper Award and national research funding and appears in venues across machine learning, systems, and digital medicine.
Join the lab
DENOS Lab is recruiting motivated MSc, PhD, and post-doctoral researchers in machine learning, distributed systems, and AI + Health. Prospective students should apply to a graduate program in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering and mention Dr. Drew in their application. Send a CV with a list of publications to Dr. Drew at the email address on his university profile.
Research
DENOS Lab pursues resilient, sustainable, 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, sustainable, real-world deployment.
News
Aug 2026
WISE intern Isha Goyal builds CardiCare, an on-device AI patient assistant
Summer intern Isha Goyal built CardiCare, an artificial intelligence assistant for coronary artery disease patients that runs entirely on an 8 GB NVIDIA Jetson, answers only from clinician approved content, and refuses everything else. It delivered zero unsafe answers across 270 test cases while a model five times its size made two.
Read the story →
Jul 2026
DENOS Lab organizes the IEEE Stablecoin and Agentic AI Forum
DENOS Lab organized the IEEE Stablecoin and Agentic AI Forum in Calgary on July 28, gathering speakers from ATB Financial, the Alberta Securities Commission, the Canadian Blockchain Consortium, and universities across North America to train talents for the era of stablecoins and agentic AI.
Read the story → Go to event page →
Jul 2026
Leo Wei joins Citizen Relations as AI Technical Lead in Toronto
DENOS Lab alumnus Leo Wei is moving to Toronto to lead artificial intelligence work at Citizen Relations, a public relations agency with offices around the world, capping a Master's marked by a Best Paper Award at IEEE ATC 2025 and research on federated learning for supply chain demand forecasting.
Read the story →
Jun 2026
Harnessing data research: AI in the emergency department
Dr. Steve Drew and the DENOS Lab are featured by the University of Calgary for ED Sim, an AI simulation platform whose autonomous agents model patients, staff, and workflows so that emergency departments can find bottlenecks and test solutions without disrupting real operations.
Read the feature →
Aug 2025
Best Paper Award at IEEE ATC 2025
DENOS Lab research received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Autonomous and Trusted Computing (ATC), held in Calgary as part of the IEEE Smart World Congress.
Visit ATC 2025 →
Jul 2025
Team wins NFRF Exploration grant for emergency department AI
Dr. Steve Drew and co-principal investigator Dr. Jessalyn Holodinsky won a New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) Exploration grant to optimize emergency department operations with multi-agent large language models, pairing rapid patient-history summarization with a simulation of clinical workflows so that hospitals can shorten wait times and ease clinician burnout.
Read the announcement →
Mar 2023
Third place at the PETs Prize Challenge
A UCalgary and Michigan State University team including Dr. Steve Drew and Fan Dong won third place in the Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Prize Challenge at the 2023 Summit for Democracy, using a federated learning approach that detects financial crime across banks without exposing personal data. Congratulations, Fan Dong!
Read the story →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
Farhan Abbas
Summer Intern, 2026
Muhammad Ahmed
Mitacs GRI Summer Intern, 2026
Isha Goyal
Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Intern, Summer 2026
Kostiantyn Ilnytskyi
Summer Intern, 2026
Hutton Ledingham
Summer Intern, 2025
Ruili Xu
Summer Intern, 2026
Swaleh Zaidi
Summer Intern, 2025
Alumni
Ali Abbasi
Master Student 2022 - 2024. currently Ph.D. student at University of South California.
Fan Dong
Master Student 2022 - 2024.
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
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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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.
