University of Illinois at Chicago
Energy & Computing Professor
I am an Associate Professor (with tenure) of Information and Decision Sciences, Bielinski Family Endowed Scholar at the College of Business Administration, and Global Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I direct the Infrastructure and Decision Intelligence for Technology & Energy Resilience (IDIATER) research group at the UIC College of Business. I work with Argonne National Laboratory and previously served as the Decision Intelligence R&D Lead at the Discovery Partners Institute (Innovation hub of the University of Illinois System).
Recent News
- AI for the Grid and AI on the Grid — Paper organizing the rapidly evolving area of AI and the power system with Argonne National Laboratory.
- New Papers on Self-Adapting Approximations — Submitted two papers focusing on weakly coupled MDPs and weakly time-coupled MDP approximations.
- Advances in Decision Analysis Conference Keynote — Honored and look forward to giving a keynote on the energy & computing nexus at Duke University. Hope to see you there!
- Future Earth Taipei Global Sustainability Webinar Series — It was great to speak about AI & Sustainability in a panel moderated by Dean Jin-Huei Yeh of the National Central University College of Management.
Research Areas
Energy & Computing Nexus
The exploration of how energy demands intensified by computing growth (e.g., data centers) can be met, and how computing advances (e.g., LLMs) can accelerate the sustainable energy transformation.
View Publications
Energy Investment & Operations
The real options valuation and management of commodity and energy conversion assets (e.g., production, storage, transport), including renewable energy.
View Publications
Self-Adapting Approximations
The solution of large scale Markov decision processes using algorithms that improve accessibility to non-technical users by automating learning from problem structure, instance data, and solution progress.
View PublicationsAwards & Honors
I have been fortunate to be recognized as a Global Scholar for international research, scholarship, and creative activity by the University of Illinois Chicago in 2024, and receive the 2024 INFORMS Harvey J. Greenberg Research Award, the 2021 Commodity and Energy Markets Association (CEMA) Best Paper Award, the 2020 INFORMS ENRE Young Researcher Prize, the Best Overall Paper at the 2020 NeurIPS Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, the 2014 William L. Cooper Dissertation Award, and the 2013 Egon Balas Best Paper Award.
About Me
Before joining UIC, I did my PhD and MS in Operations Research at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. My journey to North America started at the University of Waterloo, where I obtained an MASc in Operations Research and learnt the importance of asking 'Why Not?'. I was born in incredible India and grew up in the beautiful island of Sri Lanka (a.k.a. the pearl of the Indian Ocean) before heading back to Chennai for my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. I have enjoyed consulting with companies in the retail, high technology, and energy industries along the way.