ayan dot mukhopadhyay at vanderbilt dot edu
1025 16th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212
I am a senior research scientist at Vanderbilt University and an incoming assistant professor of computer science at the College of William & Mary. I work on Artificial Intelligence to positively impact society.
My research interests include multi-agent systems, robust machine learning, and decision-making under uncertainty. I am honored to be a Google AI Impact Scholar (2021) for Social Good.
Before this, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab at Stanford University, USA, working under Mykel Kochenderfer, where I was awarded the 2019 CARS post-doctoral fellowship by the Center of Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). Before joining Stanford, I was a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University’s Computational Economics Research Lab under Eugene Vorobeychik, working on decision-theoretic and machine learning-based approaches for multi-agent planning. My thesis was nominated for the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award 2020.
Recent News
March 2024: Our work on using annealed importance sampling for decision-making in partially observable environments has been accepted at ICAPS 2025.
February 2024: Our AAMAS '25 paper on optimizing vehicle-to-building interfaces by using reinforcement learning has been nominated for the best paper award, and the ICLR '25 paper on scalable decision-making in stochastic environments is now a spotlight paper!
February 2025: At Vanderbilt, we received the VU-ISIS Outstanding System Award for deploying an AI-based paratransit optimization system and the VU-ISIS Outstanding Paper Award for using probabilistic search to make fixed-line services more efficient.
January 2024: Our paper on scalable decision-making in stochastic environments has been accepted at ICLR 2025!
December 2024: We have two papers accepted at AAMAS 2025, one as a full paper and another as an extended abstract. See you in Detroit!
October 2024: Our EAAMO 23 paper "Designing Equitable Transit Networks," led by student Sophie Pavia, has won the INFORMS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Student Paper Award.
October 2024: I co-presented a tutorial on Non-stationary Markov decision processes and NS-Gym, a software framework we have developed that enables seamless simulation of Gym-based problems in a non-stationary context. Check out the slides or access a Google Colab notebook to learn more!
September 2024: I am the Workflow Chair and an SPC for AAMAS 25! Submit your best work on autonomous and multi-agent systems at https://aamas2025.org/.
July 2024: I will be traveling to IJCAI 2024 to present two papers on algorithms for optimizing paratransit and chair a session on applied AI. See you in Jeju!
July 2024: Led by Aron Laszka's group, our joint work on using hierarchical reinforcement learning for emergency management will be presented at ICML 2024!
June 2024: I am editing an ACM book on AI for Social Impact with Yevgeniy Vorobeychik. If you are a researcher in this field or designing/teaching a course on AI for social impact, reach out for a draft!
May 2024: Our paper on using probabilistic search to make fixed-line transit more robust has received the best paper award at ACM/IEEE ICCPS 2025.
May 2024: I am attending AAMAS, where my student will present a couple of papers on planning in non-stationary Markov decision processes. Additionally, we also have another paper on stationing fixed-line buses with Aron Laszka's group.
February 2024: I am attending AAAI to present a paper on deploying ADVISER, a data-driven optimization framework for maximizing immunization outcomes.