Dr. Bistra Dilkina

Biography

Bistra Dilkina is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She is the co-Director of the USC Center for AI Society (CAIS), which is a collaborative effort between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Prior to her current position, she served as an Assistant Professor at the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2013 to 2017 and co-directed the Data Science for Social Good Atlanta summer program. Dilkina received her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2012 and was a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability in 2013. She is recognized as a junior faculty leader in the emerging field of Computational Sustainability, having co-organized workshops and special tracks at major conferences in related subareas. Her research focuses on developing state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization techniques to tackle real-world large-scale challenges, particularly in areas such as biodiversity conservation and urban planning, intersecting discrete optimization and machine learning. A key aspect of her work involves designing machine-learning-driven combinatorial optimization algorithms that utilize extensive datasets to solve various real-world optimization problems.

Research Interests

Experience