2/15/24 | 4:15pm | E51-376

Chara Podimata

Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Statistics
MIT

Abstract: Algorithmic decision-making has become omnipresent in our everyday lives. Knowing that algorithms make several consequential decisions for their lives, humans have been documented to strategize in various ways when interacting with said algorithms. Examples of such strategizing include people/users manipulating the input data that they give to algorithms that make loan approval decisions, poachers strategizing with the placement of snares in wildlife protection parks, and users consciously avoiding consuming certain types of content in popular social media platforms like TikTok. In this talk, I will outline my work in this area with a focus on two questions: (i) how can decision-makers design algorithms that are robust to users strategizing when the users have partial information regarding the deployed algorithm, and (ii) what the implications to society are when a decision-maker fails to account for strategic individuals. I will conclude with a discussion on the emerging aspects of my policy work in human-centric algorithmic decision-making.

Bio: Chara Podimata is an Assistant Professor of OR/Stat at MIT and a Lead Researcher at Archimedes/Athena RC. Her research interests lie mostly on the intersection of Theoretical Computer Science, Economics and Machine Learning and specifically on incentive-aware machine learning, social computing, online learning, and mechanism design. Recently, she has started thinking about policy questions related to AI and recommendation systems. Before MIT, she was a FODSI postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. She obtained her PhD in CS, and was a member of the EconCS group at Harvard, where she was advised by Professor Yiling Chen. During her PhD, my research was generously supported by a Microsoft Dissertation Grant and a Siebel Scholarship. During the summer of 2019 and spring of 2020, she was an intern at Microsoft Research in New York City, mentored by Jennifer Wortman Vaughan and Alex Slivkins respectively. During the summer of 2021, she was an intern at Google in New York City, hosted by Renato Paes Leme. Before joining Harvard, she was an intern for Google in Athens, Greece. She received her Diploma from National Technical University of Athens, where I was advised by Professor Dimitris Fotakis.