Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good

Speakers

Keynote Speaker: Georgia Perakis

Georgia Perakis is a Professor of Operations Management, Operations Research & Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has been on the faculty at MIT Sloan since July 1998.

Perakis teaches courses and performs research in analytics/AI, in particular in the intersection of optimization and machine learning with applications in pricing, revenue management, supply chain, and healthcare among others. At MIT over the years, she has taught in a variety of programs such as undergraduate, MSc, PhD, MBA, and EMBA programs across MIT. For her teaching, Perakis won the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award in 2002 as well as the Jamieson Prize in 2014 for excellence in teaching, and the Teacher of the Year award (among all faculty at the MIT Sloan School) in 2017.

Keynote Speaker: Cynthia Rudin

Cynthia Rudin is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. She directs the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab, and her goal is to design predictive models that people can understand. Her lab applies machine learning in many areas, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and energy reliability. She holds degrees from the University at Buffalo and Princeton. She is the recipient of the 2022 Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (the “Nobel Prize of AI”), as well as the INFORMS Society of Data Mining Prize in 2024. She received a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Invited Speakers

Gordon Burtch

Gordon Burtch is the Allen and Kelli Questrom Professor of Information Systems and a fellow of the Digital Business Institute at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. His research focuses on the economic evaluation of information systems, using econometrics and field experiments to examine participation in online social contexts, and has appeared in leading journals including Management Science, MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research. Burtch is the recipient of multiple early career and best paper awards, has secured more than $2 million in research funding from public and private sponsors, and regularly serves in editorial and leadership roles for top journals and conferences. Before academia, he worked as an information systems auditor, hardware design engineer and technology consultant, and he teaches graduate courses in data analytics and IT management.

Yanchong (Karen) Zheng

Yanchong (Karen) Zheng is the George M. Bunker Professor and an associate professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her research focuses on operations and supply chain management, with an emphasis on data-driven decision-making. Zheng earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tsinghua University in China.