John Dickerson receives an NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor John Dickerson has received an NSF CAREER Award for his work entitled Scalable and Robust Dynamic Matching Market Design. Dickerson’s work will connect artificial intelligence and matching market theory and practice to investigate how matching markets—systems that pair individuals to products or to other people—can be improved even as their particular goals must closely adhere to stakeholders’ value judgements and operate under forms of uncertainty. 

Citing disparate examples in which matching theory is used, including organ allocation and exchange, graduate school admissions/medical school intern matching programs, and ridesharing, Dickerson’s work seeks to improve current systems to account for fairness and perhaps to improve diversity by integrating an AI approach to the decision-making process.

Dickerson’s proposed research, motivated and drawn from subfields of Al, will make advances in three areas including the following: (1) managing short-term uncertainty using AI for decision making purposes; (2) using dynamic matching to achieve both fairness and efficiency; and (3) To align human value judgements more closely with automated matching systems.

After earning a Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon University, Dickerson joined the Department of Computer Science in 2016 with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. In addition, he has affiliations with the Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation (AMSC) program and the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL).  Dickerson’s work encompasses artificial intelligence, stochastic optimization, game theory, computational economics, market & mechanism design, machine learning, kidney exchange, and healthcare policy & information technology. He is especially interested in optimal decision making and optimization in healthcare and the social sciences.

He has served as the codirector for The Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School for 2018, and will be the codirector for the Department’s summer Research Experience for Undergraduate Combinatorics and Algorithms for Real Problems for 2019.

In 2014, Dickerson’s work with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center on kidney exchange won the HPCWire "Best Data-Intensive Application" supercomputing award (tied with IBM Watson). He is a coauthor of the Handbook of Computational Approaches to Counterterrorism with V.S. Subrahmanian.

CAREER: The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.