Σεμινάριο Τμήματος Πληροφορικής

Title: Computational Problems in Team Formation

Ημερομηνία: Τετάρτη 29/11, και ώρα 10πμ

Χώρος: Αμφιθέατρο του κτηρίου Τροίας

ABSTRACT: Team formation is the problem of identifying a team of experts that can successfully perform a task. Different definitions of ``success" and different assumptions regarding the availability of experts give rise to different computational problems.  In this talk, we will review different formulations of team formation problems as they have evolved over the years. Then, we will focus on our recent work on the topic as it relates to interesting computational problems such as parameter-free optimization and regret minimization of submodular functions.  We will also review some research directions we currently explore and their applications to real-life settings.

BIO: Evimaria Terzi is a professor at the Department of Computer Science  at Boston University (BU).  She is also a founding faculty member of the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences at BU. Before joining BU in 2009, she was a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center. She got her PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2007 working under the supervision of Heikki Mannila. Evimaria works in the general area of algorithmic data mining with emphasis on social networks, team formation, urban informatics and recommender systems. She has published more than 50 papers in premier conferences in data mining and data management (SIGKDD, SIGMOD, VLDB, WSDM, WWW, SDM). She has received multiple NSF awards including the NSF CAREER award (2012), the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship (2010) and numerous gifts from companies such as Google, Yahoo and Nokia.  Evimaria has been the primary advisor of 7 graduated PhD students (4 female) and has supervised 2 post-docs. Her advisees are either faculty members or they are working in companies such as Meta, Amazon, Twitter and Apple. Evimaria has also acted as a research advisor of numerous undergraduates.  In the past, Evimaria has been a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, Sapienza University of Rome and Aalto University.  

She has  been the PC co-chair for ACM SIGKDD 2019, Siam Data Mining (SDM) 2021, and WSDM 2023. At BU, Evimaria is collaborating with BUSpark in order to apply her work on team formation in teams formed in large data-science classes at BU as well as hackathons organized in the  Boston area.