#  Phebe Vayanos (University of Southern California) 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 28, 2025** 

 11:30AM - 12:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **SEC 3.301/302/303**  



 

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   ![Phebe Vayanos Image](/sites/g/files/omnuum6171/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-03/Phebe%20picture.jpg?itok=LczyJ221) 

 

## Talk Title: *Offline risk score and policy learning for responsible allocation of scarce housing to people experiencing homelessness*

We study two problems in homeless services provision: the problem of learning vulnerability scoring rules that accurately predict the risk of an adverse outcome for people experiencing homelessness; and the problem of learning policies for matching people experiencing homeless to very scarce housing resources. We consider several challenges related to the self-reported and observational nature of the data available to help learn these models, the presence of unobserved confounders, and the occurrence of distribution shifts caused by improvements to the administration and wording of the survey used to collect the data. We propose solutions that meld optimization, machine learning, and causal inference to address these challenges. We demonstrate their effectiveness on data from the homeless management information system. This work is the result of long term partnerships with homeless service providers and policy-makers in Los Angeles and Missouri.

## Speaker: Phebe Vayanos

Phebe Vayanos is an Associate Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California where she holds a Viterbi Early Career Chair in Engineering. She is also a Co-Director of CAIS, the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society at USC and a Co-Director of the ORAI Interdisciplinary PhD Certificate Program in Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research. Her research is focused on Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence and in particular on optimization and its interface with machine learning, causal inference, and economics. Her work is motivated by complex societal problems, such as homelessness, substance use and suicide prevention, and biodiversity conservation. Prior to joining USC, she was lecturer in the Operations Research and Statistics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a postdoctoral research associate in the Operations Research Center at MIT. She is a TED AI speaker, a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Imperial College Emerging Alumni Leader Award, and the INFORMS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Ambassador Program Award. She is an associate editor for Management Science, Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, and Computational Management Science.



 

 



 

 

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