Associate Professor,
Class of 1947 Career Development Professor,
Operations Research & Statistics,
Sloan School of Management, MIT.
Research Areas: Algorithmic Fairness, Optimization, Machine Learning.
I’m available at swatig at mit.edu,
Office: E62-582 (or a coffee shop near MIT)
Support Staff: Gabe Kies (gkies at mit.edu)
PS – I’m looking for enthusiastic graduate students to join my research group in Fall 2025.
Hello! I am an Associate Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management in OR & Statistics and a Class of 1947 Career Development Professor. I received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 2017, and joint Masters and B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 2011. My Erdös number is 2.
Research: My research focuses on developing new models and optimization/AI for mitigating “FATE” (fairness, accountability, transparency and explainability) concerns in algorithmic decisions, as well as pushes the boundaries of efficient optimization and machine learning. I develop techniques in combinatorial, non-linear, and robust optimization, with a focus on first-order optimization. My work spans various applications domains like hiring, admissions, districting, supply chains, e-commerce, platforms, healthcare, energy, and quantum optimization. To bring my work to the real-world, I frequently interact and collaborate with industry, as well as with doctors, physicists, law and policy scholars. You can further explore my publications here. My research is supported through industry funding, as well as federal agencies like NSF and DARPA, and from cross-institute interdisciplinary centers such as SERC.
Honors: My work has received recognition in the form of the 2023 NSF CAREER Award, the JP Morgan Early Career Faculty Recognition in 2021, the NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative Award in 2019, Simons Berkeley Research Fellowship 2017-2018, and the Google Women in Engineering Award (India) in 2011. I also led the technical thrust of Ethical AI in the multi-institution NSF AI Institute on Advances in Optimization (ai4opt.org), from 2021-2023. I have been fortunate to work with a fantastic group of students. My group has received recognition at various venues like NeurIPS spotlight, INFORMS Doing Good with OR 2022, INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research 2018, INFORMS Computing Society 2016, and INFORMS Service Science Student Paper 2016.
Teaching and Outreach: I strongly believe that foundational understanding of optimization and the nuanced challenges of algorithmic fairness are crucial to preparing the next generation of leaders and scientists. I have developed new courses, enhanced existing ones, and tailored the delivery of key concepts depending on the audience – graduate students, undergraduates, K-12 school students, lawyers and policy professionals. In the past, I have received two teaching honors namely Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 CIOS Honor Roll in 2020 and in 2021 at Georgia Tech. At MIT, I teach courses broadly in OR and statistics, e.g., on optimization and data analytics. I am also a part of the cross-disciplinary SERC faculty action group at MIT tasked with designing new educational material that creates a dialogue on social and ethical responsibilities of computing.
Service: I also regularly serve on review committees, editorial boards, and program committees. I am currently an associate editor for Open Journal of Mathematical Optimization, and a co-editor for OPTIMA (newsletter of the Mathematical Optimization Society). I have recently served on the PC for IPCO 2024, NeurIPS 2023 (area chair), ACDA 2023, EAAMO 2022, FAccT 2022 (area chair), WINE 2021 and FORC 2021 (publications chair). I have further served on multiple NSF review panels and have had the privilege of serving on a few INFORMS award committees. I have been actively engaged in the organization of many cross-disciplinary workshops, including Grid Science Winter School 2023 at Los Alamos National Labs, ICERM Workshop on Trends in Computational in Discrete Optimization 2023, Quantum Computing and Operations Research at Fields Institute 2022, and CCC-INFORMS Workshop on AI/OR Workshop 2022.
For more information about latest activity in my research group, check out News!
For media inquiries, reach out to Gabe Kies (gkies@mit.edu).
For my artistic pursuits and exhibits, check out Creative.
