Research Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Education
Biography
Dr. Ajitesh Srivastava is a Research Assistant Professor at the Ming Hsieh Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering. He is also an Associate Director of the USC Center for AI in Society (CAIS), a joint effort between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
He obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California in 2018. His research interests include network science, modeling, and machine learning applied to epidemics, social good, and social networks. He collaborates with teams around the world and the CDC for infectious disease forecasting and scenario projections. He has been a PI/co-PI of many NSF, CDC, and DARPA-funded awards. He is a DARPA Grand Challenge Winner (2014). He is also an Indian National Math Olympiad Awardee (awarded to 30 students in India in 2008).
Research Summary
Dr. Ajitesh Srivastava's research is centered around the application of network science, modeling, and machine learning to real-world applications. Current work spans applications in epidemics and homelessness. In epidemics applications, he uses a combination of time-series, epidemic modeling, and graph neural network methods improve forecasting, scenario modeling, evaluation, and ensemble development. He also works on policy optimization problems over diffusion models that combine epidemics and human behavior. In homelessness, he is works on a combination of graph neural networks, and network diffusion processes to understand the driving factors of behavior and to optimize peer-based interventions. Beyond these applications, he is interested in machine learning theory to improve graph neural networks and knowledge discovery.
