Shivani Agarwal

Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science
Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science
University of Pennsylvania

[Bio] | [Selected Activities & Leadership Roles]

Bio

Shivani Agarwal is Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science and (by courtesy) of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are primarily in the computational, mathematical, and statistical foundations of machine learning and data science, including theory and algorithms; they also include applications of machine learning, particularly in the life sciences, as well as connections between machine learning and other disciplines such as economics, operations research, and psychology, particularly related to statistical ranking and choice modeling. She has served as an Action Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and an Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review, and served as Program Co-Chair for the Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) in 2020. She has also served as Lead PI and Director of the NSF-funded Penn Institute for Foundations of Data Science (PIFODS) and Co-Director of the Penn Research in Machine Learning (PRiML) forum, as well as Co-Director of the Indo-US Joint Center for Advanced Research in Machine Learning, Game Theory, and Optimization. Prior to her current position, she was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and taught as an Assistant Professor and Ramanujan Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science and as a postdoctoral lecturer at MIT. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Selected Professional Activities and Leadership Roles

  • New paper at NeurIPS 2025: Efficient PAC learning for realizable-statistic models via convex surrogates [pdf]
  • Guest Speaker, India@Harvard Podcast, 2025 (includes discussion on machine learning and on strengthening the R&D ecosystem in India)
  • Lead PI and Director, Penn Institute for Foundations of Data Science (NSF-funded HDR TRIPODS institute, 2019–2024)
  • Co-Director, Penn Research in Machine Learning (PRiML.upenn) (2017–2022)
  • Program Co-Chair, COLT 2020
  • Action Editor, Journal of Machine Learning Research (2018–2022)
  • Associate Editor, Harvard Data Science Review (2018–2022)
  • Associate Editor, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2016–2018)
  • Co-Director, Indo-US Joint Center for Advanced Research in Machine Learning, Game Theory, and Optimization (2012–2015)
  • Session Organizer, Indo-American Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium, Irvine, CA, USA, August 2015
  • Co-Organizer, Symposium on Learning, Algorithms, and Complexity,
    IISc, Bangalore, India, January 2015
  • Founder and Organizer, Big Data Public Lecture Series, IISc, Bangalore, India, 2014–2015
  • Co-Organizer, N(eur)IPS Workshop on Analysis of Rank Data: Confluence of Social Choice, Operations Research, and Machine Learning, N(eur)IPS 2014, Montreal, Canada, December 2014
  • Co-Organizer, Indo-US Lectures Week in Machine Learning, Game Theory, and Optimization, IISc, Bangalore, India, January 2014
  • Co-Organizer, Indo-US Symposium on New Directions in Machine Learning, Game Theory, and Optimization, IISc & Lalit Ashok Hotel, Bangalore, India, November 2010
  • Co-Organizer, Workshop on The Mathematics of Ranking
    American Institute of Mathematics, Palo Alto, CA, USA, August 2010
  • Co-Organizer, N(eur)IPS Workshop on Advances in Ranking
    N(eur)IPS 2009, Whistler, Canada, December 2009
  • Co-Organizer, N(eur)IPS Workshop on Learning to Rank
    N(eur)IPS 2005, Whistler, Canada, December 2005