From enhancing international trade logistics to freeing up more hospital beds to helping farmers, MIT Professor Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88 presented the 54th Annual James R. Kilian delivered the Faculty Achievement Award lecture by summarizing how his work in operations research has helped drive real-world improvements.
Bertsimas also explained how artificial intelligence is now being used as a tool in some of his scholarly projects and in the MIT Open Learning efforts, which he currently directs – another aspect of a highly productive and acclaimed career spanning more than four decades at the institute. The Killian Prize is the highest award given by MIT to its faculty.
“I have tried to improve the human condition,” Bertsimus said, summarizing the breadth of his work and the many applications he has found for it in everyday life.
At MIT, Bertsimas is Vice Provost for Open Learning, Associate Dean for Online Education and Artificial Intelligence, Boeing Leaders Professor of Management for Global Operations, and Professor of Operations Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also served as the inaugural Faculty Director of the Master of Business Analytics program at MIT Sloan, and has held the position of Associate Dean of Business Analytics.
Bertsimus’ comments included his previous insights and his ongoing studies, as well as his current efforts to integrate AI into his research. Describing the concept of “robust adaptation”, a highly influential approach that Bertsimas helped develop in the early 2000s, he described how it has, for example, enabled more reliable shipping through the Panama Canal. Other methods of adaptation aim to bring more ships through the canal every day – up to 48 – but will sometimes encounter significant problems. Bertsimas’ approach recognized that 45 ships a day was better – a slightly lower number, but one ship “was always possible,” he said.
Over time, Bertsimas’ work has helped create all kinds of solutions in business logistics; It has also been used to allocate school buses in Boston.
Recently, as Bertsimus explained in the lecture, he and his colleagues have been working on a number of issues with Hartford Healthcare in Connecticut, and are increasingly incorporating AI into the development of tools for diagnostics, among other things. On the optimization front, their research has suggested ways to reduce the average time a patient stays in hospital from 5.38 days to 4.93 days. At the main Hartford hospital they studied, that reduction would enable more than 5,000 additional patients per year to be accommodated, given the number of existing beds.
“It’s a very different ballgame,” Bertsimus said.
Bertsimas delivered his lecture, titled “Algorithms for Life: AI and Operations Research Transforming Healthcare, Education, and Agriculture,” before more than 300 MIT community members in Huntington Hall (Rooms 10-250) on campus.
The award was established in 1971 to honor James Killian, whose distinguished career included serving as the 10th President of MIT from 1948 to 1959 and later as President of the MIT Corporation from 1959 to 1971.
“Professor Bertsimus’s scholarly contributions are extensive and unprecedented,” Roger Levy, chair of the MIT faculty and professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, said in introductory remarks. “He is one of those rare individuals who has made significant contributions to both intellectual threads in the field of operations research: number one, optimization – combinatorial, linear, and nonlinear – and number two, stochastic processes.”
Indeed, Bertsimas’ work has helped develop better tools for studies and operations, as well as a wide range of applications. As Bertsimus said in his lecture, the deaths of both his parents in 2009 helped him begin to think broadly about the ways operations research could help health care.
Bertsimas received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. After moving to MIT for his graduate work, he earned an MS in operations research and a PhD in applied mathematics and operations research. Bertsimas joined the MIT faculty after receiving his doctorate, and has remained at the institute since.
Bertsimas is also known as an energetic teacher, having been the principal advisor to a remarkable number of PhD students – 106 and counting at this time.
“Supervising my doctoral students is my favorite activity,” Bertsimus said. “In my opinion, it is a privilege to work with such extraordinary young people as we have at MIT, in terms of ability, character and aspiration. They really make me a better scientist and a better human being.”
“MIT is part of my identity,” Bertsimus quips, noting that he is the only faculty member on campus whose first name consists of these three letters in sequence.
In the latter part of the lecture, Bertsimas highlighted the work he is doing as Vice Provost for Open Learning at MIT. He has personally developed a large online course based on his material, “The Analytics Edge”. In his current role, Bertsimus said, he now aspires to see MIT reach a billion learners with online courses, part of his effort to “democratize access to education.”
Bertsimas also demonstrated to the audience some of the AI tools he and his colleagues are working on to bring learning online, including ways to summarize content and translate online content into other languages.
This is just another chapter in a long and extensive career devoted to developing tools to help us understand and navigate phenomena.
Or as Burstimas said summarizing his scholarship at one point in the lecture, “I try to increase human understanding of how the world works.”
