Announcements

• Colloquium on Digital Transformation Science

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  August 2027, 3 pm CT Lessons from COVID-19: Efficiency vs. Resilience Targeted Dynamic Interventions in Networked Epidemic Models Asuman Ozdaglar, MathWorks Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT Francesca Parise, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell Moshe Y. Vardi, University Professor, Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering, Rice University REGISTER FOR ZOOM WEBINAR In both computer science and economics, efficiency is a cherished property. In computer science, the field of algorithms is almost solely focused on their efficiency. In economics, the main advantage of the free market is that it promises "economic efficiency." A major lesson from COVID-19 is that both fields have over-emphasized efficiency and under-emphasized resilience. Professor Vardi argues that resilience is a more important property than efficiency and discusses how the two fields can broaden their focus to make resilience a primary consideration. He will include a technical example, showing how we can shift the focus in formal reasoning from efficiency to resilience. Epidemic spread models are playing an increasingly central role for understanding and policy making in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these models consider homogeneous populations, thus failing to capture rich heterogeneities in terms of risk factors, vulnerabilities, economic participation, location, and social interactions. In this talk, we will present networked SIR models that capture groups of agents with different characteristics and interaction patterns. We will then discuss targeted dynamic interventions in terms of testing and lockdown policies that minimize spread of infection while also containing social and economic damages. Our focus will be on dynamic time-varying policies that adaptively adjust as a function of the infection level in the community. Asuman Ozdaglar received the B.S. degree from the Middle East Technical University (1996), and the S.M. (1998) and Ph.D. (2003) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She’s the Mathworks Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the EECS Department at the MIT. She’s the Department Head of EECS and the Deputy Dean of Academics in the Schwarzman College of Computing. Her research expertise includes optimization theory, distributed optimization and control, and network analysis. Her awards include a Microsoft fellowship, NSF Career award, 2008 Donald P. Eckman award of the American Automatic Control Council, Class of 1943 Career Development Chair, inaugural Steven and Renee Innovation Fellowship, and 2014 Spira teaching award. Francesca Parise joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in July 2020. Before then, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. She defended her PhD at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2016 and she received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Information and Automation Engineering in 2010 and 2012, from the University of Padova, Italy, where she simultaneously attended the Galilean School of Excellence. Francesca was recognized as an EECS rising star in 2017 and is the recipient of the Guglielmo Marin Award from the “Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti,” the SNSF Early Postdoc Fellowship, the SNSF Advanced Postdoc Fellowship, and the ETH Medal for her doctoral workMoshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. He is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, the Southeastern Universities Research Association's Distinguished Scientist Award, and the ACM SIGLOG Church Award. He is the author and co-author of over 600 papers and the books Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea. He holds six honorary doctorates. He is currently a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, after having served for a decade as its Editor-in-Chief.

  
  

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