Dr. Bistra Dilkina

Biography

Bistra Dilkina is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She serves as the co-Director of the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence Society (CAIS), a collaborative initiative between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Prior to her current position, Dilkina was an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she co-directed the Data Science for Social Good Atlanta summer program. She earned her PhD from Cornell University in 2012 and worked as a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability in 2013. Her research is at the forefront of the field of Computational Sustainability, focusing on addressing significant societal challenges through advanced optimization techniques. She has been instrumental in organizing workshops and tutorials at major conferences in this area and has developed machine-learning-driven combinatorial optimization algorithms to tackle complex real-world problems, particularly in biodiversity conservation and urban planning.

Research Interests