R Ravi

Andris A. Zoltners Professor of Business
Operations Research Group
Director, Analytics Strategy
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA

I am a professor of Operations Research at the Tepper School of Business and a professor (by courtesy) at the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

My research focuses on models, methods and applications of discrete optimization. My research interests are in models and methods for discrete optimization, and applications in the intersection of business and technology. My current research focuses on applications in network design and information dissemination, omnichannel fulfillment, online advertising, and more broadly in mechanism design, and social and information networks. My work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, and grants from Google, the NSF, the ONR and the AFOSR.

I am interested in networks and their effects in business, a subject on which I introduced a new MBA class for which I won the George Leland Bach teaching award selected by the MBA students in 2013 and 2020. I am also interested in customer-centric marketing and how to accomplish this using optimization methods on large data sets, on which I co-developed another new MBA class and co-authored a book. I recently designed and launched new courses on end-to-end business analytics to masters and undergraduate students.

At the Tepper School of Business, I served as the Associate Dean for Intellectual Strategy between 2005 and 2008. Between the Fall of 2012 until the summer of 2015, I was the Chair of the Future Educational Delivery Committee that designed and deployed the online hybrid MBA program, the new blended format of the Tepper MBA. At the Tepper School, I have held the title of Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professor between 2014 and 2018, and Carnegie Bosch Professor between 2006 and 2013. I recently took on the role of Director of Analytics Strategy at the school, and as an Amazon Scholar.

I was elected a fellow of the INFORMS in 2017.

Links to: Contact information; Past students and postdocs.


Educational Activities

Recent Courses

Advising


Videos and Slides

I have collected some videos from the public domain that I have helped produce below.


Editorial Work

I was area editor for the INFORMS flagship journal Operations Research for the Discrete Optimization area between 2012-2017. I have formerly served in the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Management Science, Networks and the Journal of Algorithms.

I have also served in several conference program committees in the past, in particular as program chair for the paper selection committees of FOCS 2008, APPROX 2011 and SWAT 2014.


Books and Lecture Notes


Research Papers