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Speaker Name and Title:
Phebe Vayanos
Assistant Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Computer Science
Associate Director of USC Center for AI in Society
Talk Title:
Assisting Vulnerable Communities through Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research
Talk Abstract:
In this talk, we discuss new techniques in Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research to help mitigate homelessness. This research is motivated by our ongoing partnership with policy-makers at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and with several homeless shelters in the Los Angeles area.
As of 2019, it is estimated that there are over 58,000 individuals experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County alone. At the same time, housing resources to help support those experiencing homelessness are scarce. Current housing allocation policies have resulted in disparities across waitlisted individuals based on their protected characteristics. In this work, we use historical data from the homeless management information system to help understand and quantify these disparities and to design data-driven allocation policies that optimally balance fairness, efficiency, and transparency. We also devise active elicitation techniques to learn the preferences of stakeholders over policy outcomes to ensure our policies better serve this vulnerable population.
We discuss concrete steps we are taking to deploy these interventions in the real world to make a tangible positive impact in society.
Speaker Bio:
Phebe Vayanos is an Assistant Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She is also an Associate Director of CAIS, the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, an interdisciplinary research initiative between the schools of Engineering and Social Work at USC. Her research is focused on Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research and in particular on optimization, machine learning, and game theory. She aims to build foundational knowledge in these areas to enable the design of intelligent systems that can operate reliably in the open world, in complex, uncertain environments, and against strategic adversaries. She designs algorithms that are suitable for use by human decision-makers, that are transparent and interpretable, and that integrate human value judgments. Her work is motivated by problems that are important for social good, such as those arising in public housing allocation, public health, public safety and security, and biodiversity conservation. Prior to joining USC, she was lecturer in the Operations Research and Statistics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a postdoctoral research associate in the Operations Research Center at MIT. She holds a PhD degree in Operations Research and an MEng degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, both from Imperial College London. She serves as a member of the ad hoc INFORMS AI Strategy Advisory Committee. She is an elected member of the Committee on Stochastic Programming (COSP).
