Dr. Shivani Agarwal

Biography

Shivani Agarwal is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a courtesy appointment in the Statistics Data Science department. Her research primarily focuses on the computational, mathematical, and statistical foundations of machine learning and data science, with particular emphasis on theoretical algorithms. She has actively engaged in applications of machine learning in life sciences and has explored connections between machine learning, economics, operations research, and psychology, especially in the context of statistical ranking and choice modeling. Agarwal has held significant editorial roles including Action Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review. She has previously served as Program Co-Chair for the Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) in 2020 and has led multiple prestigious initiatives including being the Lead Principal Investigator and Director of the NSF-funded Penn Institute for Foundations of Data Science (PIFODS). After completing her PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she has held academic positions such as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and has served as an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science. She has been actively involved in numerous conferences and workshops aimed at advancing the fields of machine learning and optimization.

Research Interests