ORAI: A Program at the Frontier of AI for Decision-Making

Sponsored by an NSF National Research Traineeship grant, the ORAI program at the University of Southern California is an interdisciplinary PhD certificate program in Operations Research (OR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that aims to train students in doing research at the interface of the two fields and integrating techniques from the two disciplines. Among other skills, students will be trained to:

• understand, apply, and extend cutting-edge methods that synergize the strengths of machine learning and discrete optimization techniques

• design responsible (robust, interpretable, private, and fair) AI and ML systems using OR techniques, and

• use AI and OR to solve decision-making problems informed by data, including data that may be scarce, biased, noisy, or subject to distribution shifts.

ORAI engages and trains students in research, possible deployment, and commercialization of technologies that integrate OR and AI to address problems that cannot currently be solved by any one discipline in silo.

ORAI is the first graduate interdisciplinary program between AI and OR in the world. It builds on the unique strengths of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, numerous USC centers, including the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS), METRANS, and CREATE, and the USC site of the NSF AI institute for Advance in Optimization (ai4opt). It leverages the expertise of USC faculty in the Industrial & Systems Engineering department and in the Computer Science department, who have a track record doing interdisciplinary research in ORAI.

All USC PhD students who want to conduct interdisciplinary research in AI and OR as part of their dissertation may  join the ORAI program. There are no citizenship requirements for trainees, so students from all countries are welcome. We particularly welcome applications from candidates from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields.

At USC, all students who are admitted to our PhD programs are guaranteed at least 4 years of funding provided they make good progress in their studies. Students who are US citizens, nationals, or permanent residents are additionally eligible for the prestigious ORAI program fellowships. 

The ORAI PhD Certificate is awarded for completing, among other things:

• interdisciplinary research in OR and AI

• 3 out of 4 newly launched courses at the interface of OR and AI

• a seminar course about the science, application, and collaborative approaches of ORAI, including workshops on ethics and entrepreneurship. 

The ORAI program does not increase the number of classes that students in either the CS PhD program or ISE PhD program need to take to graduate.

For more information on the courses, see here. For sample research projects, see here. 

For more information on the ORAI program, see here. For specific questions, please contact Dr. Phebe Vayanos.