Bistra Dilkina

Associate Professor of Computer Science and co-Director of Center on AI in Society at University of Southern California (USC) | Cornell'12 (PhD) | SFU'04 | UWCAD'99 | ACS'98 | RSI'96

Los Angeles, California, United States

About

AI | Optimization | ML | Social Good | Computational Sustainability ---- I work on developing scalable solution techniques for solving large-scale real-world optimization problems, merging ideas from algorithm design, operations research and machine learning. I am keen on bringing these state-of-the-art methodologies to problem domains that have important societal impact. In particular, I work on predictive and optimization problems related to habitat wildlife conservation and curbing illegal wildlife poaching and trafficking, as well as urban infrastructure resilience to disasters and climate change, among others.

Experience

  • University of Southern California (8 yrs 7 mos)
    • co-Director of the Center on AI in Society (CAIS)
      Sep 2020 - Present · 5 yrs 11 mos

    • Associate Professor Of Computer Science
      Jun 2020 - Present · 6 yrs 2 mos

    • Associate Director of Center for AI in Society
      Jan 2018 - Sep 2020 · 2 yrs 9 mos

  • co Director at USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society
    Sep 2020 - Present · 5 yrs 11 mos

  • Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology
    Aug 2013 - Dec 2017 · 4 yrs 5 mos

    College of Computing School of Computation Sciences and Engineering

  • Institute for Computational Sustainability, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
    • Post Doctoral Associate
      Aug 2011 - Jul 2013 · 2 yrs

      Achieving sustainability requires balancing social, environmental and economic needs in the face of scarce resources and hence optimization and decision problems lie in the heart of many sustainability issues. I develop models and solution techniques for large-scale real-world optimization problems that arise in sustainability, with a strong emphasis on conservation planning.

    • Research Assistant / Teaching Assistant
      Sep 2005 - Aug 2011 · 6 yrs

      Studied hidden structure in combinatorial decision and optimization problems that can explain the surprisingly good scaling behavior of search algorithms on real-world problems (e.g. from verification and product configuration).

  • Summer Intern at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
    Jun 2009 - Aug 2009 · 3 mos

    worked in the Production Modeling group with Jayant Kalagnanam and Andrew Davenport