Congratulations to Computer Science Ph.D. student Ahmed Imteaj and his advisor M. Hadi Amini, assistant professor, who was awarded the Best Paper Award during the Annual Conference on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence. As members of Sustainability, Optimization, and Learning for InterDependent networks laboratory (solid lab) at School of Computing and Information Sciences, they are developing distributed machine learning and optimization techniques to solve the emerging engineering problems, such as the optimal operation of smart cities infrastructures. The paper is entitled “Distributed Sensing Using Smart End-user Devices: Pathway to Federated Learning for Autonomous IoT” and introduced a distributed sensing platform that enables deployment of federated learning. Particularly, they designed a distributed IoT sensing mechanism and analyzed how such an approach can be beneficial in leveraging an efficient federated learning algorithm. The impact of this research goes beyond computer science and can be applied to various real-world applications from healthcare to energy and transportation infrastructures.