Amin Rahimian, PhD

Assistant Professor

1006 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261 C: 267-393-2376

rahimian@pitt.edu

Biographical Sketch

Amin Rahimian joined the Industrial Engineering Department in the fall of 2020. Prior to that he was a postdoc with joint appointments at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and MIT Sloan School of Management. He did his PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania with a masters in Statistics from the Wharton school. Broadly speaking his works are at the intersection of networks, data, and decision sciences. He has published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Operations Research journal.

Research Overview

Amin Rahimian’s research focuses on the challenges of inference and intervention design in large-scale sociotechnical systems, with applications ranging from online social networks, e-commerce and collective decision/action platforms to modern civilian cyberinfrastructure and future battlefields. Information plays a critical role in the operation of traditional sociotechnical institutions such as markets and polls and its role is only magnified in the age of data. Dr. Rahimian borrows tools from applied probability, statistics, algorithms, as well as decision and game theory to develop distributed inference and decentralized intervention schemes with a particular focus on the role of information and its societal implications, including on diversity, fairness and privacy.

Research Projects

• Speed and spread of social contagions • Social learning, coordination and collective action in large groups • Seeding effective and equitable interventions with limited and costly information • Effective and equitable allocation of limited resources over large-scale social networks