Amin Rahimian, Biosketch

I am an assistant professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Before joining Pitt IE in the fall of 2020, I was a postdoc with joint appointments at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and MIT Sloan School of Management (co-advised by Elchanan Mossel and Dean Eckles). I did my PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (advised by Ali Jadbabaie). Broadly speaking my works are at the intersection of networks, data, and decision sciences. I borrow tools from applied probability, statistics, algorithms, as well as decision and game theory. Some of my current focus is on the challenges of inference and intervention design in complex, large-scale sociotechnical systems, with applications ranging from online social networks, e-commerce and collective decision/action platforms to public health, modern civilian cyberinfrastructure and future warfare. I am especially interested in the critical role that information plays in the operation of sociotechnical systems and its societal implications, including on privacy, fairness and diversity. I have served on the program committee of the 2021 ACM Economics and Computation conference, the advisory council of the 2021 vaccine confidence fund (then a new industry alliance), as well as the program committees of EAAMO'22 (Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization), SocialSens2022 (Special Edition on Information Operation on Social Media), 2022 IISE annual meeting (as the operations research track co-chair), and 2023 ACM Economics and Computation conference. I am currently serving on the program committees of the 2024 Web Conference, 2024 Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence workshop (PPAI), 2024 Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy workshop (TPDP), and 2024 Annual Modeling and Simulation Conference (as the US and Canada publicity chair). I have published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, the Operations Research journal, Automatica journal, and several IEEE transactions and control theory journals. At Pitt, I lead the Sociotechnical Systems Research Lab and have taught Stochastic Processes (IE 2084, PhD qualifier), Statistics and Data Analysis (IE 2007, old PhD qualifier) and Advanced Topics in Operations Research (IE 3080, my focus in Fall 2023 was on probabilistic analysis of algorithms and randomized algorithms). I currently teach Foundations of Statistics (IE 2117, a new PhD qualifier), Design of Experiments and Quality Assurance (IE 1072, a required undergraduate course), as well as an undergraduate technical elective called "Data for Social Good" (IE 1171) that was developed as a Pitt Year of Data and Society initiative.