Sebastian Pokutta

Sebastian Pokutta is the David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor at Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering. He serves as director of the Interactive Optimization and Learning Lab and associate director of Georgia Tech's Center for Machine Learning. His research spans Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, and Machine Learning with applications in quantum computing, social science modeling, and sustainability.

• Mathematics M.Sc. and PhD from University of Duisburg-Essen (2003-2005)
• Postdoc at MIT Operations Research Center
• Former roles at IBM ILOG, TU Darmstadt, MIT, and University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

Recent research focuses on Frank-Wolfe algorithms for optimization, quantum entanglement thresholds, and human-AI co-creativity. His work has been published in Transactions on Mathematical Software, Mathematics of Operations Research, and ICML proceedings.

Scientific awards include:

• 2025 Science Prize from the Association for Pediatric Orthopedics (VKO)
• 2025 Land-Doing MIP Computational Competition winner

He co-leads the Cluster of Excellence MATH+ and directs research at the Interactive Optimization and Learning Lab, focusing on real-world deployments like biomass estimation from satellite data and mathematical discovery with AI. His recent blog posts discuss federated learning robustness and Frank-Wolfe.jl algorithmic improvements.