From improving international business planning to freeing up more hospital beds to help farmers, MIT Professor Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88 summarized how his work in operations research has helped real-world development, when he presented the annual James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award Lecture at MIT on Thursday, March 19.
Bertsimas also explained how artificial intelligence is now being used in some of his course projects and as a tool for the MIT Open Learning initiative, which he currently directs – another part of the most productive and acclaimed work during forty years at the Institute. The Killian Award is the highest award MIT bestows on its faculty.
“I tried to improve the human condition,” said Bertsimas, summarizing the scope of his work and the many daily life initiatives he has discovered.
At MIT, Bertsimas is a leading advocate of open learning, director of online education and artificial intelligence, Boeing Leaders of the World Careers Professor of Management, and professor of career research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also served as the inaugural director of the master of analytics program at MIT Sloan, and has held the position of director of the business analytics department.
Bertsimas’ remarks include both his previous insights and his ongoing studies, as well as his current efforts to add AI to his research. Explaining the concept of “firm optimization,” an influential approach that Bertsimas helped develop in the early 2000s, he explained how it has made, for example, more reliable shipping through the Panama Canal. Some development methods aim to get more ships through the canal every day – up to 48 – but they will encounter serious problems at some point. Bertsimas’ method indicated that 45 ships a day was better — a slightly lower number, but one that was “always possible,” he noted.
Over time, Bertsimas’ work has helped organize all kinds of solutions in business management; it has been used for school bus distribution in Boston.
Recently, as Bertsimas explained in the speech, he and his collaborators have been working with Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut on a wide variety of issues, and are increasingly integrating AI into the development of diagnostic tools, among other things. Prior to the improvement, their study suggested ways to reduce a patient’s average hospital stay, from 5.38 days to 4.93 days. At Hartford’s main hospital they have learned, given the number of available beds, that reduction has resulted in more than 5,000 additional patients staying each year.
“It’s a very different game of football,” said Bertimas.
Bertsimas delivered his talk, titled “Algorithms for Life: AI and Operations Research Transforming Healthcare, Education, and Agriculture,” to an audience of more than 300 MIT community members in Huntington Hall (Room 10-250) on campus.
The award was established in 1971 to honor James Killian, whose distinguished career included serving as MIT’s tenth president, from 1948 to 1959, and later as chairman of the MIT Corporation, from 1959 to 1971.
“Professor Bertsimas’ contributions are wide-ranging and compelling,” said Roger Levy, MIT faculty chair and professor in the Department of Brain and Psychiatry, during his introductory remarks. “He is one of those rare individuals who has made a significant contribution to both intellectual strands in the field of operations research: one, optimization – integrative, direct, and indirect – and number two, stochastic processes.”
Indeed, Bertsimas’ work has helped to develop both better tools for study and practice, while also having a wider range of applications. As Bertsimas noted in his speech, the deaths of both his parents in 2009 helped him begin to look more closely at the ways in which surgical research could help health care.
Bertsimas received his BS in electrical engineering and computer science from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. Moving to MIT for his graduate work, he earned his MS in operations research and his PhD in statistical and operations research. Bertsimas joined the MIT faculty after receiving his doctorate, and has remained at the Institute ever since.
Bertsimas is also known as an active teacher who has been a major mentor to an impressive number of PhD students – 106 and counting, currently.
“By far and away my favorite job is supervising my doctoral students,” said Bertimas. “It’s a privilege, in my opinion, to work with young people as unique as the ones we have at MIT, with skills and personality and ambition. They actually make me a better scientist, and a better person.”
“MIT is part of my identity,” Bertsimas laughed while noting that he is the only member of the college with those three letters, in a row, in his first name.
In the last part of the speech, Bertsimas highlighted the work he was doing as an open teaching assistant at MIT. He has personally created a large online course based on his own material, “Analytics Edge.” In his current role, Bertsimas said, he now wants MIT to reach a billion students through online courses, part of his effort to “democratize access to education.”
Bertsimas also showed the audience some of the AI tools he and his colleagues are working to bring to online education, including summarization methods, and translation of online materials into other languages.
It’s just one chapter in a long and wide career dedicated to capturing adventure and developing tools to help us navigate it.
Or as Berstimas noted when summarizing his scholarship at one point in a speech, “I’m trying to increase people’s understanding of how the world works.”
