NRT-AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research Technologies (Track 1)

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of Southern California (USC) will be used to educate graduate students at the interface of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR). Both disciplines study how to make smart decisions, and their technologies have complementary strengths. Cross-fertilizing AI and OR technologies, as done in the research part of this project, has the potential to result in technology breakthroughs. However, integrating technologies from different disciplines is difficult, and different disciplines have different ideas about what constitutes a good solution (often due to disciplinary training). Therefore, this project provides graduate students with interdisciplinary training to prepare them for their research at the interface of AI/OR. Overall, it anticipates training a diverse cohort of 38 Ph.D. students, including 19 funded trainees, from computer science and operations research. Another 10 Ph.D. students and 15 Master’s students are expected to enroll in the AI/OR program courses each year. These students will be trained to work in interdisciplinary settings and have more tools available than their non-interdisciplinarily educated peers to create technology and systems for decision-making/support. The project will also make the created course material broadly available as a stepping stone toward introducing joint AI/OR Ph.D. degrees at USC and other universities. The project creates a graduate specialization (in the form of a certificate program) for Ph.D. students enrolled in the computer science (CS) and industrial and systems engineering (ISE) departments of USC. The students will perform research at the interface of AI and OR while taking four graduate courses that teach a blend of AI and OR technologies (plus their applications to the design of decision-making/support tools) in an integrated and uniform way. Each course will integrate technical and ethics material (to prevent the many issues that have plagued the fielding of decision-making support systems in the past) and involve projects with use cases provided by several USC centers. The program will be supported by workshops (that teach the students important non-technical skills such as communication, teamwork, equity and inclusion, team leadership, mentoring, project management, and entrepreneurship), a weekly seminar with research talks by the students and invited speakers, and an annual research showcase. Several components of the program will be designed to encourage interdisciplinary interactions among students and between students and faculty members to bridge the gap in research culture between AI and OR. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.