Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing

Bistra Dilkina is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computational Science and Engineering.  She received her Ph.D in Computer Science from Cornell University and joined Georgia Tech in August 2013.

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Dilkina works on challenging computational problems that arise in the area of sustainability and sustainable development. In particular, decision and optimization problems are at the heart of many applications domains in the new interdisciplinary field of Computational Sustainability. She is interested in network design problems as they arise in large-scale wildlife conservation planning and urban planning.  

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Her work on sustainability-related problems focuses both on novel and impactful application domains of computational techniques, as well as on identifying new computational problems in the sustainability-related applications that require the development of models and solution techniques that push forward the field of computer science.  She is one of the first young faculty in the United States to focus on Computational Sustainability and has played a role in fostering this new field from the beginning, by organizing workshops, giving talks, and publishing papers in special tracks and conferences.

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At Georgia Tech, she teaches a special topics graduate class on Computational Sustainability, where she introduces computing students to the wide variety of applications in sustainability and shows them how they can harness their deep expertise in data analytics, machine learning, and algorithms to address important computational problems with high societal impact. 

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