R Ravi

Vasantrao Dempo Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science
Operations Research Group
Director, Analytics Strategy
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA

Dr. R. Ravi is the Vasantrao Dempo Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Ravi received his bachelor's degree from IIT, Madras, and Master's and doctoral degrees from Brown University, all in Computer Science.

Ravi has been at the Tepper School of Business since 1995 where he served as the Associate Dean for Intellectual Strategy from 2005-2008, and Chair of the Future Educational Delivery Committee that launched the online hybrid Tepper MBA in 2013. Ravi is currently Director of Analytics Strategy at the school as part of which he founded the Center for Intelligent Business. He has been an Amazon Scholar since 2021.

Ravi's research is on models, methods and applications of discrete optimization. He studies models and methods in combinatorial and network optimization, and their applications in the intersection of business and technology, specifically in the areas of supply chains and logistics in Operations, and online advertising in Marketing. His work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, and grants from Google, the NSF, the ONR and the AFOSR. His 1989 paper in the ACM STOC conference won the 30-year test of time award in 2023.

Ravi's research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Naval Research and Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He has supervised over two dozen doctoral students and developed over half a dozen new graduate classes. He served as area editor for the INFORMS flagship journal Operations Research in charge of the discrete optimization area from 2012 to 2017, and was chair of the IEEE FOCS conference in 2008.

Ravi held the title of Andris A. Zoltners Professor of Business between 2014 and 2024, Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professor between 2014 and 2018, and Carnegie Bosch Professor between 2006 and 2013. He 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

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

He has 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