Ryan Shi

Ryan Shi is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information (SCI) at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on applying AI to address societal challenges in food security, environmental conservation, and public health, collaborating with nonprofit organizations globally. He specializes in game theory, online learning, and reinforcement learning, emphasizing deployable solutions.

Shi holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in Societal Computing from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. He interned at Microsoft and Facebook during his Ph.D. and has been recognized with awards such as the 2023 IAAI Deployed Application Award and the 2022 Siebel Scholar Award.

His work includes developing systems like Newspanda for environmental media monitoring and Maviper for interpretable multi-agent reinforcement learning. Recent projects involve optimizing food bank logistics, improving crowdsourcing platforms, and advancing low-resource language NLP for environmental conservation.

• Key Research Themes: Interpretable AI, Social Good Deployment, Responsible Algorithms
• Notable Deployments: Food rescue platforms, conservation monitoring tools

Shi's research bridges theoretical foundations and real-world impact, with a focus on scalability, sustainability, and ethical considerations in AI applications.