Diego Klabjan

Welcome!

Diego Klabjan’s research is focused on genAI, LLMs, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and other topics in machine learning and AI. Developing new models and algorithms is his expertise together with underlying theoretical analyses. In terms of industries, he has projects in bioinformatics, insurance, transportation, sports and finance. Among other companies, he has collaborated with AllState, Anthem, Baxter, Intel, Stats LLC, United Airlines, American Airlines, Sabre Holdings, FedEx Express, General Motors, and NASA.

Diego Klabjan is a professor at the Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. After obtaining his doctorate from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999 in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization, in the same year he joined the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in the former department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. In summer 2007 he accepted an associate professor tenured position at Northwestern University. In 2012 he was promoted to a full professor at Northwestern University. He is the recipient of the first prize of the 2000 Transportation Science Dissertation Award and the Preseren’s award for the outstanding undergraduate thesis.

He is the Director of the Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Science and he serves as Director, Center for Deep Learning.

My hypothesis: Gene editing may pose existential threats to humanity—long before the rise of deep-neural-network-based AGI or ASI.

Ph. D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Major: Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization
Dissertation: Topics in Airline Crew Scheduling and Large-Scale Optimization
Advisers: George Nemhauser & Ellis Johnson
July 1999

B.S. in Mathematics

University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Major: Applied Mathematics
Thesis: A Randomized Algorithm for Computing the Volume of a Convex Set
Adviser: Bojan Mohar
March 1994

Awards

• Preseren’s Award for the Best Undergraduate Thesis, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1994.
• First Prize 2000 Transportation Science Section Dissertation Prize, INFORMS, San Antonio, 2000.
• Pushing the Boundaries of the Possible, Intel’s Outstanding Researcher Award, 2019.
• Jack Meredith Best Paper Awards Honorable Mention, Journal of Operation Management, 2022.

Awards by Students

• 2004 Anna Valicek Medal Winner, AGIFORS, Singapore (Rivi Sandhu, Integrated Airline Planning)
• 2006 Best Student Paper, The 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering, Atlanta, GA (Hector Gonzales, Warehousing and Analyzing Massive RFID Data Sets)
• 2011 Student Paper Contest, Railway Application Section of INFORMS, Second prize, Charlotte, NC (by post-doctoral student Conrado Borraz)
• 2015 APDIO/IO Award, Best Thesis in years 2013-2014 by Portuguese OR Society (by Ph.D. student Luis Guimarães)
• 2015 Isabel Themido Award, best paper in 2013-2014 by Portuguese OR Society (by Ph.D. student Luis Guimarães)
• 2015 INFORMS Computing Society, Best Student Paper (by Ph.D student Young Woong Park)
• 2017 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, Best Student Paper (by Ph.D student Xiaofeng Zhu)