Our Team
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Research Interests
Our group’s research contributions have been in three areas: (1) risk analysis and management in complex engineered systems, (2) cyberinfrastructure and “big data” analytics for molecular products design and discovery, and (3) complex adaptive teleological systems. These challenges are addressed using a combination of artificial intelligence, informatics, statistics, and mathematical programming techniques and is carried out in his newly founded Complex Resilient Intelligent Systems Laboratory (CRIS Lab) at Columbia.
(1) Risk Analysis and Management in Complex Engineered Systems
Numerous lives and billions of dollars are lost periodically in industrial accidents as the Bhopal, Piper Alpha, BP Texas City and BP Deepwater Horizon accidents remind us. To design and operate complex industrial processes more safely and optimally, we are developing automation methodologies for the identification, analysis, and control of risks in process systems using real-time hybrid intelligent systems. Professor Venkat and his group have been exploring various approaches for the integration of process monitoring, data reconciliation, fault diagnosis, and supervisory control tasks into a single unified real-time framework. Knowledge-based systems, neural networks, statistical techniques and mathematical programming approaches are being developed to address these problems.
(2) Cyberinfrastructure and “Big Data” Analytics for Molecular Products Design and Discovery
Designing new materials and formulations with desired properties is an important and difficult problem, encompassing a wide variety of products in the specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries. Traditional trial-and-error design and discovery approaches are laborious and expensive, and cause delays time-to-market as well as miss some potential solutions. Furthermore, the growing avalanche of high throughput experimentation data has created both an opportunity, and a major modeling and informatics challenge, for material design and discovery. A new paradigm is needed that increases the idea flow, broadens the search horizon, and archives the knowledge from today’s successes to accelerate those of tomorrow.
Cyberinfrastructure will play a crucial role in molecular products design, process development and commercial scale manufacturing by streamlining information gathering, data integration, model development, and managing all these for easy and timely access and reuse. Towards this goal, we have developed a novel framework, called Discovery Informatics, that is based on knowledge-based systems, statistical machine learning, neural networks and genetic algorithms, for the rapid discovery and design of new materials such as fuel additives, rubber compounds, polymers, catalysts, and nanomaterials. We are also developing another related paradigm, called Ontological Informatics, that involves the development and implementation of ontologies and algorithms for knowledge representation and information sharing to support decision-making in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
(3) Complex Adaptive Teleological Systems
An important challenge facing the 21st century science is in understanding how complex adaptive systems composed of millions of relatively simple interacting entities produce complex emergent behavior. Such emergent behavior is seen in a wide range of problems such as the behavior of ant colonies, flocking behavior of birds, investor behavior in stock markets, consciousness in brain and so on.
Our group is interested in the modeling, analysis, control and optimization of such emergent phenomena in complex, adaptive, networked, teleological systems via self organization. Teleological systems are systems with a purpose or goal. They are specifically designed, or evolved, to achieve this purpose in some operating environment, often competitive or even hostile. They are different from ordinary thermodynamical systems, such as gas molecules enclosed in a container, which are governed by the laws of statistical thermodynamics. The molecules themselves are purpose-free.
Complex teleological systems may be human-designed, such as the ones in engineering (e.g., Internet, transportation networks, national power grids, etc.), economics (e.g., corporations, supply chain networks, etc.), sociology (e.g., governmental organizations), and so on. They can also be naturally evolved complex systems such as cellular and metabolic networks, protein interaction networks, food webs, ecosystems, etc. One may view the purpose or goal as a survival objective of teleological systems in some environment. For example, in biology, an organism needs to execute the functions of reproduction and growth, at some desired performance levels dictated by the environment, in order to survive, grow and propagate its species. In economics, a corporation needs to execute a variety of business and/or manufacturing functions efficiently, safely, and quickly in order to survive and grow in a competitive market for its customers. Professor Venkat's group is exploring a deeper understanding of such networks using statistical mechanics, optimization, artificial intelligence, and artificial life models.
Professor Upmanu Lall is currently a faculty member of the Earth and Environmental Engineering department and the director of Columbia Water Center. His research interests include hydroclimatology, nonlinear dynamics, and applied statistics; natural hazards, water systems, and risk management; water technologies for developing countries. As the director of the Columbia Water Center, Lall’s work emphasizes the importance of viewing water issues across several traditional academic disciplines in order to understand dimensions of these global problems.
Dr. Stephen Morse's interests focus on epidemiology of infectious diseases, and improving disease early warning systems. In 2000, he returned to Columbia after 4 years in government as program manager for Biodefense at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Defense, where he co-directed the Pathogen Countermeasures program and subsequently directed the Advanced Diagnostics program. Before coming to Columbia, he was assistant professor of Virology at The Rockefeller University in New York, and remains an adjunct faculty member. His book, Emerging Viruses (Oxford University Press) was selected by "American Scientist" for its list of "100 Top Science Books of the 20th Century". Dr. Morse was chair and principal organizer of the 1989 NIAID/NIH (National Institutes of Health) Conference on Emerging Viruses, for which he originated the term and concept of emerging viruses/infections; served as a member of the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Emerging Microbial Threats to Health (and chaired its Task Force on Viruses), and was a contributor to its report, Emerging Infections (1992). He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats, and the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Future Biowarfare Threats; and has served as an adviser to numerous government and international organizations. He was the founding chair of ProMED (the nonprofit international Program to Monitor Emerging Diseases) and was one of the originators of ProMED-mail, an international network inaugurated by ProMED in 1994 for outbreak reporting and disease monitoring using the Internet.
Soulaymane Kachani conducts research in the fields of dynamic pricing, revenue management, machine learning, logistics, supply chain management, algorithmic trading, statistical arbitrage, traffic flow modeling, and transportation analysis. He is an affiliated member of two centers of the Columbia Data Science Institute: The Financial and Business Analytics Center and the Foundations of Data Science Center. He is also an affiliated member of the Columbia Center for Financial Engineering and the Computational Optimization Research Center. He teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the areas of quantitative corporate finance, industrial economics, operations consulting, logistics, pricing, and production and inventory planning.
Professor Kachani serves as Columbia University’s Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation. In this role, he leads the development of Columbia University’s teaching, learning, and innovation strategies, supporting schools, colleges, and departments in offering new and extending existing on-campus, online, and hybrid courses and programs to audiences at Columbia and around the world. He founded and has been overseeing the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning and ColumbiaX. He also serves as Senior Vice Dean of Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and is in charge of the School's world-class undergraduate, Master's, PhD, executive, online and global programs.
Robert V. Sideli, M.D. became the Chief Information Officer for Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) on June 15, 2007. Bob was a resident and chief resident in Pathology at Presbyterian Hospital, completed a fellowship in Medical Informatics in the Center for Medical Informatics, and was then an Assistant Professor of Pathology (in the Center for Medical Informatics) from 1993-1995. He played an important role in developing and installing the clinical information systems that were built by the clinical informatics group in the Center for Medical Informatics. He spent several years with a consulting firm, and then held the position of Chief Information Officer at the Metropolitan Jewish Health System in Brooklyn. In 2003 he took a senior position at Cerner and has led the implementation of Cerner information technology products at a major hospital system in Indiana.
Rajiv Sethi joined the faculty of Barnard in 1995. In addition to his teaching duties for the Barnard economics department, he is a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia, and regularly teaches graduate courses in Columbia's economics department and the School of International and Public Affairs. He is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Professor Sethi's teaching includes courses in financial economics, the economics of inequality, and mathematical methods. His recent research deals with credit derivatives and sovereign default, the dynamics of beliefs on networks, the economics of crime, and persistent inequality between social groups. He has also worked on the evolution of social norms and interdependent preferences, decision-making under bounded rationality, and the dynamics of asset prices in financial markets.
Peter Bearman is Director of the Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, the Cole Professor of Social Science, Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program. He was the founding director of ISERP, serving from the Institute's launch in 2000 until 2008. A recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman is currently investigating the determinants of increased prevalence of autism. A specialist in network analysis, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and has used the data extensively for research on topics including adolescent sexual networks, networks of disease transmission, and genetic influences on same-sex preference. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (Rutgers, 1993). He is the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Professor Glasserman's research and teaching address risk management, derivative securities, Monte Carlo simulation, statistics and operations. Prior to joining Columbia, Glasserman was with Bell Laboratories; he has also held visiting positions at Princeton University, NYU, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 2011-2012, he was on leave from Columbia and working at the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department, where he continues to serve as a part-time consultant.
Glasserman's publications include the book Monte Carlo Methods in Financial Engineering (Springer, 2004), which received the 2006 Lanchester Prize and the 2005 I-Sim Outstanding Publication Award. Glasserman is a past recipient of the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1994 - 99), IBM University Partnership Awards (1998 - 2001), the TIMS Outstanding Simulation Publication Award (1992), the Erlang Prize (1996), the IMS Medallion from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2006), and a fellowship from the FDIC Center for Financial Research (2004). He received the 2004 Wilmott Award for Cutting-Edge Research in Quantitative Finance and Risk Magazine's 2007 Quant of the Year Award, and he received a U.S. patent for an option pricing method. He was named an INFORMS Fellow in 2008. He is also a recipient of the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence (1994, 2000) and the Saul Gass Expository Writing Award (2016). Glasserman serves on the editorial boards of Operations Research, Mathematical Finance, the Journal of Derivatives, and Stochastic Systems.
Glasserman was senior vice dean of Columbia Business School in 2004-2008 and served as interim director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics in 2005-2007. He currently serves as research director of the Program for Financial Studies.
Professor Karl Sigman is currently a faculty member and director of undergraduate programs of the IEOR department. His research interests include queuing theory, stochastic networks, point processes, insurance risk, and economics. Sigman is also a multiple-time recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award.
José A. Scheinkman is the Edwin W. Rickert Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Theodore A. Wells ‘29 Professor of Economics (emeritus) at Princeton University and a Research Associate at the NBER. Previously, Scheinkman was the Alvin H. Baum Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, Blaise Pascal Research Professor (France), Visiting Professor at Collège de France, Vice President in the Financial Strategies Group of Goldman, Sachs & Co. and co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has served as a consultant to several financial institutions and serves on the board of Cosan Limited, a NYSE listed company engaged in the production and distribution of sugar, ethanol and energy in Brazil. Scheinkman is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Econometric Society, Corresponding Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and received a “docteur honoris causa” from the Université Paris-Dauphine. In 2007 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Scheinkman’s current research focuses on bubbles in financial markets and the determinants of the size of the financial industry.
Research Areas
Probabilistic mechanics, risk and reliability, uncertainty quantification, hazards analysis.
Biography
Professor Deodatis received his Diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece in 1982. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from Columbia University, received in 1984 and 1987 respectively. He started his academic career at Princeton University in 1988 where he served as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Assistant Professor and eventually Associate Professor (with tenure). He moved to Columbia University in 2002 where he served as Associate Professor and Professor. Since 2007, he holds the Santiago and Robertina Calatrava Family Endowed Chair at the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. He is currently serving as the Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.
His research interests are in the area of probabilistic methods in civil engineering and engineering mechanics where he has contributed in developing theories and methodologies for simulation of stochastic processes and fields to model uncertain earthquake/wind/wave loads and material/soil properties, reliability and safety analysis of structures, stochastic mechanics, stochastic finite element analysis, earthquake engineering, structural dynamics, random vibrations, and risk assessment and management of civil infrastructure systems subjected to natural and technological hazards.
He has written over one hundred thirty technical papers published in journals and conference proceedings. In recognition of his scholarly contributions in the field, he has received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (IASSAR) Junior Research Prize, and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Walter Huber Research Prize. He has served as the Chair of the ASCE Probabilistic Methods Committee and as the Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the following journals: Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics, Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, Engineering Under Uncertainty: Hazards, Assessment & Mitigation, Structural Safety, and Uncertainty Quantification. He is the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering. In 2009, he was elected President of the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability for a four-year term. In 2013, he chaired the International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability that was held in New York City. He has served in the scientific and/or organizing committees of numerous national and international technical conferences.
Over his academic career at Princeton and Columbia, he has developed a number of courses at the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. levels. He has graduated eighteen Ph.D students and is currently advising six Ph.D. students. In recognition of his teaching accomplishments, while on the faculty at Princeton University, he was awarded the Engineering Council's Excellence in Teaching Award six times, the Engineering Council's Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Princeton's highest teaching honor. At Columbia University, he has received the Engineering School Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award, the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.
Garud Iyengar’s research is focused on understanding uncertain systems and exploiting available information using data-driven control and optimization algorithms. He and his students have explored applications in many diverse fields, such as machine learning, systemic risk, asset management, operations management, sports analytics, and biology.
Iyengar’s research group is currently working on thermodynamics of sensing and memory in cells, an automatic defensive assignment and event detection in NBA games, a deep neural-network-based framework for interpretable robust decision making, attribution schemes for allocating payment in a multi-channel advertising, systemic risk associated with extreme weather, and an NLP-based model for predicting stock performance using news reports.
Iyengar received a B Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1993 and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1998. He is a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute.
Diane Vaughan received her Ph.D. in Sociology, Ohio State University, 1979, and taught at Boston College from 1984 to 2005. During this time, she was awarded fellowships at Yale (1979-82), Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford (1986-87), The American Bar Foundation (1988-1989), The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1996-1997), and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003-04). She came to Columbia in 2005.
Her interests are the sociology of organizations, sociology of culture, deviance and social control, field methods, research design, and science, knowledge, and technology. The prime theoretical focus of her research is how the social - history, institutions, organizations - affect individual meanings, decisions, and action. Culture is the important mediator in this process, making ethnographic methods, supplemented by interviews, the best means of understanding these relationships.
Since 1980, she has been working on analogical theorizing: developing theory from qualitative data based on cross-case analysis. The goal is to compare cases of similar events, activities or phenomena across different organizational forms in order to elaborate general theory or concepts. This project has focused on the "dark side" of organizations: mistake, misconduct, and disaster. Her interest in how things go wrong in organizations has thus far resulted in Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior, Uncoupling, and The Challenger Launch Decision. The product of this work is a book in progress, Theorizing: Analogy, Cases, and Comparative Social Organization.
Her NASA analysis was awarded the Rachel Carson Prize, the Robert K Merton Award, Honorable Mention for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship of the American Sociological Association, and was nominated for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. As a result of her analysis of the Challenger accident, she was asked to testify before the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003, then became part of the Board's research staff, working with the Board to analyze and write the chapters of the Report identifying the social causes of the Columbia accident.
The analogical theorizing project has led her now to an ethnography and interview-based study of air traffic control. In particular, she is examining it as a negative case: how controllers are trained to recognize early warning signs and anomalies as signals of potential danger and correct them, so that little mistakes do not turn into catastrophes. Comparing four air traffic facilities, the focus is the work that air traffic controllers do and the interface between human cognitive abilities and technology in a highly standardized system in which risk and safety are their responsibility. Much of the viability of air traffic control depends upon the human component, as individuals do boundary work, negotiating institutional, organizational, and air space boundaries in order to keep the system going.
David Park straddles the intersection of social, statistical, and computational systems. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University, and a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland. Dr. Park was formerly Assistant Professor in political science and the Applied Statistics Center at Washington University, St. Louis, and Assistant Professor in political science at George Washington University. He was a Russell Sage Visiting Scholar from 2009-2010.
Dr. Park has written numerous articles, and in 2008 co-authored Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. He currently serves as Director of Special Projects at the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University.
Professor Daniel Bienstock is a faculty member of IEOR department. His research focuses on optimization and high-performance computing. His current research concentration involves the use of computational mathematics in the analysis and control of power grids, especially the study of vulnerabilities and of cascading blackouts.
Damon J. Phillips is the James P. Gorman Professor of Business Strategy. He received his PhD from Stanford University. Before joining Columbia in 2011, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (from 1998-2011). During the 2010-2011 academic year he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Professor Phillips has expertise in social structural approaches to labor and product markets, entrepreneurship, innovation, organizational strategy and structure, as well as social network theory and analysis. His industry specialties are markets for professional services (law, consulting, investment banking, accounting) and culture (music industry). He is currently has a book contract with Princeton University Press on the market for recorded jazz tentatively titled "Shaping Jazz". In addition to publishing in top journals within management and sociology, Professor Phillips has been on the editorial board of the Administrative Science Quarterly, an Associate Editor with Management Science, and is currently a Consulting Editor at the American Journal of Sociology. Professor Phillips is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Morehouse College with a bachelor's degree in physics. He earned his first master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a second master's degree in sociology from Stanford University. Before pursuing his PhD at Stanford, he worked as an engineer and researcher affiliated with the U.S. Air Force (Lincoln Labs, MA) and was vice president in a family-owned electronics manufacturing business. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters, learning to play instruments, and listening to music. Areas of Expertise: The Sociology of Labor Markets and Professional Careers Social Networks Managing Innovation, Creativity, and Change Entrepreneurial Management
Professor Carri Chan is currently a faculty member of the school of business. Her research interests include modeling complex stochastic systems, dynamic optimization, scheduling and queuing. Her current focus is on problems related to health-care operations management.
Bruce M. Kogut is the Sanford C. Bernstein Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School and the Department of Sociology, Columbia University. He is researching Inequality and executive compensation, ideological slant in academic scholarship, and the political color of boards using the tool kit of computational social science. He is in the course of writing a book on the global transmission of productivity in historical perspective. MIT Press published his edited book The Small Worlds of Corporate Governance in 2012, which used graph and simulation tools to analyze the properties of governance in 25 countries and globally; the data in the project are available at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co web site. He was for the academic year 2012-13 a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin. Bruce received a BA from Berkeley, an MIA from Columbia University and a PhD from MIT.
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis (with John Carlin, Hal Stern, and Don Rubin), Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (with Deb Nolan), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (with Jennifer Hill), Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (with David Park, Boris Shor, Joe Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina), and A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences (co-edited with Jeronimo Cortina).
Andrew has done research on a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote; why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable; why redistricting is good for democracy; reversals of death sentences; police stops in New York City, the statistical challenges of estimating small effects; the probability that your vote will be decisive; seats and votes in Congress; social network structure; arsenic in Bangladesh; radon in your basement; toxicology; medical imaging; and methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference, computation, and graphics.
Alissa Park develops technologies for carbon mineral sequestration, sustainable energy conversion of solid wastes, and electrostatic phenomenon in multiphase flow systems.
The containment of CO2 involves CO2 separation, transportation, and storage. Until now these technologies have been developed independently of one another, which has resulted in complex and economically challenged large scale designs. Park’s work addresses this by focusing on tools to enable the development of a viable energy conversion system integrated with in-situ carbon mineral sequestration.
At the same time, Park’s research group is investigating an energy conversion system that converts the now landfilled petrochemical portion of MSW to value added liquid fuel which is very attractive in terms of environmental sustainability and national security. At Columbia, Park is also involved in building a laboratory specialized in electrostatic phenomena, to study in depth a system containing non-conductive liquid fuel and fine particles. The fundamental findings from this study related to electrostatic charge generation and dissipation in various multiphase flows will contribute to the understanding of the particle-particle interactions and interparticle forces, the development of the non-invasive measurement technique, and the improvement in the computational fluid dynamics.
Park earned her BASc and MASc in chemical and biological engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada and her PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Ohio State University.
Agostino Capponi joined Columbia University in August 2014 as an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.
His main research interests are in the area of financial engineering with main focus on counterparty risk, systemic risk, and dynamic optimization. For his research, has been awarded a grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The outcome of his research contributes to a better understanding of risk management practices, along with their systemic implications, and to assess the impact of regulatory policies aiming at stabilizing financial markets. His research has been published in top-tier academic journals of financial engineering and control, including Mathematical Finance, Finance and Stochastics, SIAM Journal of Financial Mathematics, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and Automatica. His work has also been published in leading practitioner journals and invited book chapters.
Agostino is a frequently invited speaker at major academic and financial stability conferences in the area of credit and systemic risk.
During 2003-2004, he was a Marie Curie fellow at Thales, a leading company in the defense and aerospace industry. There, he developed a polynomial time algorithm for multi-sensor multi-target tracking, which resulted in a world patent.
Professor Capponi received his Master and Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science and Applied and Computational Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, respectively in 2006 and 2009.