From enhancing international business logistics to freeing up more hospital beds to helping farmers, MIT Professor Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88 summarized how his work in operations research has helped drive real-world improvements, while delivering the 54th annual James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award Lecture at MIT on Thursday, March 19.
Bertsimas also described how artificial intelligence is now getting used in a few of his scholarly projects and as a tool in MIT Open Learning efforts, which he currently directs — one other facet of a highly productive and lauded profession over 4 a long time on the Institute. The Killian Award is the best prize MIT gives its faculty.
“I even have tried to enhance the human condition,” Bertsimas said, summarizing the breadth of his work and the numerous applications to on a regular basis living that he has found for it.
At MIT, Bertsimas is the vice provost for open learning, associate dean for online education and artificial intelligence, Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, and professor of operations research within the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also served because the inaugural faculty director of the master of business analytics program at MIT Sloan, and has held the position of associate dean of business analytics.
Bertsimas’ remarks encompassed each his past insights and his ongoing studies, in addition to his current efforts so as to add AI to his research. Describing the concept of “robust optimization,” a highly influential approach that Bertsimas helped develop within the early 2000s, he explained the way it has enabled, as an example, more reliable shipping through the Panama Canal. Other approaches to optimization aimed toward getting more vessels through the canal on daily basis — as much as 48 — but would encounter significant problems at times. Bertsimas’ approach identified that 45 vessels a day was higher — a rather lower number, but one which “was all the time feasible,” he noted.
Over time, Bertsimas’ work has helped structure every kind of solutions in business logistics; it has even been used for the allocation of faculty buses in Boston.
More recently, as Bertsimas explained within the lecture, he and his collaborators have been working with Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut on a wide selection of issues, and are increasingly incorporating AI into the event of tools for diagnostics, amongst other things. On the optimization front, their research has suggested ways to scale back the typical stay of a hospital patient, from 5.38 days to 4.93 days. Within the primary Hartford hospital they’ve studied, given the variety of existing beds, that reduction has enabled greater than 5,000 additional patient stays per yr.
“It’s a really different ballgame,” Bertsimas said.
Bertsimas delivered his lecture, titled “Algorithms for Life: AI and Operations Research Transforming Healthcare, Education, and Agriculture,” to an audience of over 300 MIT community members in Huntington Hall (Room 10-250) on campus.
The award was established in 1971 to honor James Killian, whose distinguished profession included serving as MIT’s tenth president, from 1948 to 1959, and subsequently as chair of the MIT Corporation, from 1959 to 1971.
“Professor Bertsimas’ scholarly contributions are each extensive and groundbreaking,” said Roger Levy, chair of the MIT faculty and a professor within the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, while making introductory remarks. “He’s considered one of the rare individuals who has made significant contributions to each mental threads in the sector of operations research: one, optimization — combinatorial, linear, and nonlinear — and number two, stochastic processes.”
Indeed, Bertsimas’ work has helped develop each higher tools for studying and conducting operations, while also having a wide selection of applications. As Bertsimas noted in his lecture, the deaths of each of his parents in 2009 helped propel him to start out taking a look at extensively at ways operations research could help health care.
Bertsimas received his BS in electrical engineering and computer science from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. Moving to MIT for his graduate work, he then earned his MS in operations research and his PhD in applied mathematics and operations research. Bertsimas joined the MIT faculty after receiving his doctorate, and has remained on the Institute ever since.
Bertsimas can be often called an lively teacher who has been the principal advisor to a remarkable variety of PhD students — 106 and counting, at this point.
“It is much and away my favorite activity, to supervise my doctoral students,” Bertsimas said. “It’s a privilege, in my view, to work with exceptional young people just like the ones we’ve got at MIT, in ability and character and aspiration. They really make me a greater scientist, and a greater person.”
“MIT is an element of my identity,” Bertsimas quipped while noting that he’s the one faculty member on campus who has those three letters, so as, in his first name.
Within the latter a part of the lecture, Bertsimas highlighted work he has been doing as vice provost of open learning at MIT. He has personally developed an large online course based on his own material, “The Analytics Edge.” In his current role, Bertsimas said, he now aspires for MIT to achieve a billion learners with online courses, a part of his effort to “democratize access to education.”
Bertsimas also demonstrated for the audience some AI tools he and his colleagues are working to bring to online education, including ways of condensing material, and the interpretation of online material into other languages.
It’s just yet one more chapter in an extended and broad-ranging profession dedicated to grasping phenomena and developing tools to assist us navigate it.
Or as Berstimas noted while summarizing his scholarship at one point within the lecture, “I attempt to increase the human understanding of how the world works.”
