Georgia Perakis

(joint work with Leann Thayaparan and Asterios Tsiourvas)

Abstract: Data-driven decision-making has garnered a growing interest due to the increase in data availability in recent years. With that growth many opportunities as well as challenges arise. Optimization can play an important role to address these challenges in both predictive and prescriptive tasks in Operations Management applications. In this talk, we discuss some of our recent work that highlights how to integrate optimization in data-driven decision-making when optimization is handled in an offline manner using trained Machine Learning models. We focus on how we can optimize over already trained objective functions that arise either from tree ensemble predictive models or from neural network models in order to recommend better decisions.

Bio: Georgia Perakis is the John C Head III Dean (Interim) of the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Professor of Operations Management, Operations Research & Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is on leave from the roles of co-director of the Operations Research Center and Associate Dean for Social and Ethical Responsibility in Computing (SERC) in the Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Sloan. Her widely published research has received many awards and focuses on analytics/AI, in particular, in the intersection of optimization and machine learning with applications in pricing, revenue management, supply chain, and healthcare among others. She received the PECASE Award from the Office of the President on Science and Technology. In 2016, she was elected as an INFORMS Fellow, and in 2021 as Distinguished MSOM Fellow. Perakis has passion for supervising PhD, masters, and undergraduate students, having graduated 30 PhD and 59 masters students. She has received numerous awards for teaching including the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award (2002), the Samuel M. Seegal Award (2012), the Jamieson Prize for excellence in teaching (2014), and the Teacher of the Year Award (2017) at MIT Sloan. Perakis is currently the Editor in Chief of the M&SOM journal and has served as editor at a number of other publications. She holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Athens as well as an MS in applied mathematics and a PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University.