Discrete Optimization Challenges in Computational Sustainability
- 14:00 10th October 2018 ( week 1, Michaelmas Term 2018 )Lecture Theatre B, Wolfson Building
Computational sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research focused on computational problems that arise in the quest for sustainable development. In this talk, I will provide a sample of computational sustainability problems from the areas of biodiversity conservation and infrastructure planning. I will describe, for example, network design problems motivated by challenging planning problems in wildlife corridor conservation, as well as our system PAWS-ML for informing ranger patrol planning for anti-poaching efforts.
I will emphasize the unique opportunities for scalable constraint reasoning and optimization techniques to contribute to the new research area of computational sustainability. I will describe our recent advances in improving the state-of-the-art in large-scale optimization by leveraging machine learning techniques to inform the design of combinatorial search algorithms. These include ML-driven advances in Branch-and-Bound search for Mixed Integer Programming and in greedy algorithms for Graph optimization problems.
Speaker bio
Bistra Dilkina is a Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and an Associate Director of the USC Center for AI in Society (CAIS), since January 2018. Before that, Dilkina was as an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-director of the Data Science for Social Good Atlanta summer program. She received her PhD from Cornell University, and was a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability. Her work spans discrete optimization, machine learning, network design, and stochastic optimization. Dilkina's research focuses on advancing the state of the art for solving real-world large-scale combinatorial optimization problems, particularly ones that arise in sustainability areas such as biodiversity conservation planning and urban planning. Dilkina is one of the junior faculty leaders in the young field of Computational Sustainability, and has co-organized workshops, tutorials, special tracks at AAAI and doctoral consortium on Computational Sustainability.Share this:
