Dr. Bistra Dilkina

Biography

Bistra Dilkina is an Associate Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She is the co-Director of the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence Society (CAIS), a collaborative effort between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Prior to her current appointment, she was an Assistant Professor at the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology from 2013 to 2017 and co-directed the Data Science for Social Good Atlanta summer program. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2012 and was a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability in 2013. Bistra is recognized as a junior faculty leader in the emerging field of Computational Sustainability, where she co-organizes workshops and tutorials at major conferences. Her research focuses on innovative combinatorial optimization techniques to address large-scale real-world problems, especially those related to sustainability, such as biodiversity conservation and urban planning. She explores the intersection of discrete optimization and machine learning, with an emphasis on designing machine-learning-driven combinatorial optimization algorithms that leverage extensive real-world data to solve complex optimization issues.

Research Interests

Experience