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 Theory for Impact: Structured Decision-Making under Uncertainty Speaker (s):
Davin Choo
Post Doctoral Fellow
Harvard University
| Date: Time: Venue: | | 18 August 2025, Monday 2:30pm – 3:30pm School of Computing &
Information Systems 1 (SCIS 1)
Level 5, Meeting Room 5-1
Singapore Management University
80 Stamford Road,
Singapore 178902 Please register by 17 August 2025.  |
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About the Talk While heuristics and expert judgment play a central role in real-world decision-making -- from disease testing to infrastructure planning -- these processes often reveal structure that presents opportunities for principled algorithmic design to complement and strengthen existing approaches. This talk presents two projects from my postdoctoral research at Harvard, developed through close collaboration with domain experts, that illustrate how formalizing such problems can lead to efficient algorithms with provable guarantees.
The first project addresses adaptive disease testing on graphs, where we develop a Gittins index-based policy that is provably optimal on trees and demonstrates strong empirical performance even when structural assumptions do not hold. In collaboration with the WHO and the Gates Foundation, we are working toward a trial-run deployment of this method in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, under the HIV LIFT project.
The second project focuses on health facility planning in Ethiopia, formulated in collaboration with the Ethiopian public health institute and Ministry of Health. We model multi-step allocation under online budget constraints and region-level fairness requirements as a submodular optimization problem, and design learning-augmented and greedy algorithms with provable guarantees. We are working on next steps with our partners to validate the method and develop an interactive tool for regional planners.
Together, these examples reflect a broader agenda of using theoretical tools to formalize and improve decision-making in complex, real-world settings by complementing domain expertise with structure, efficiency, and provable guarantees. About the Speaker Davin is a postdoctoral fellow at Teamcore, Harvard University. He did his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), holds a Master's degree from ETH Zürich, and earned two undergraduate degrees from NUS, in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. He is broadly interested in designing practical algorithms with theoretical guarantees and analyzing existing heuristics by providing guarantees under real-world assumptions. During his Ph.D., his work primarily focused on designing and analyzing algorithms for learning causal and probabilistic models, as well as learning-augmented algorithms. He is currently actively exploring opportunities to apply principled algorithmic techniques to solve real-world problems and create a positive social impact. |
