10/23/25 | 4:15pm | E51-145
Priya Donti
Assistant Professor, MIT EECS and LIDS
MIT
Abstract: Addressing climate change will require concerted action across society, including the development of innovative technologies. While methods from machine learning (ML) have the potential to play an important role, these methods often struggle to contend with the physics, hard constraints, and complex decision-making processes that are inherent to many climate and energy problems. To address these limitations, I present the framework of “optimization-in-the-loop ML,” and show how it can enable the design of ML models that explicitly capture relevant constraints and decision-making processes. For instance, this framework can be used to design learning-based controllers that provably enforce the stability criteria or operational constraints associated with the systems in which they operate. It can also enable the design of task-based learning procedures that are cognizant of the downstream decision-making processes for which a model’s outputs will be used. By significantly improving performance and preventing critical failures, such techniques can unlock the potential of ML for operating low-carbon power grids, improving energy efficiency in buildings, and addressing other high-impact problems of relevance to climate action.
Bio: Priya Donti is an Assistant Professor and the Silverman (1968) Family Career Development Professor at MIT EECS and LIDS. Her research focuses on safe and robust machine learning for high-renewables power grids. Priya is also a co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI, a global nonprofit initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. Priya received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She was recognized as part of the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35” and Vox’s 2023 “Future Perfect 50,” and is a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, the ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Siebel Scholarship, the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and best paper awards at ICML (honorable mention), ACM e-Energy (runner-up), PECI, the Duke Energy Data Analytics Symposium, and the NeurIPS workshop on AI for Social Good.