[AI Seminar] AI Lunch - Feb 9th Room Change

[Ellen Vitercik]

Dear faculty and students,

Please note that AI lunch <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aiseminar/> will be in *NSH
1507* this Tuesday, February 9th at noon. John Dickerson
<http://jpdickerson.com/> will speak about Better Matching Markets via Data
and Optimization: Evidence from a Nationwide Kidney Exchange.

*Abstract*: The exchange of indivisible goods without money addresses a
variety of constrained economic settings where a medium of exchange—such as
money—is considered inappropriate. Participants are either matched directly
with another participant or, in more complex domains, in barter cycles and
chains with other participants before exchanging their endowed goods. We
show that techniques from computer science and operations research,
combined with the recent availability of massive data and inexpensive
computing, can guide the design of such matching markets and enable the
markets by running them in the real world.

A key application domain for our work is kidney exchange, an organized
market where patients with end-stage renal failure swap willing but
incompatible donors. We present new models that address three fundamental
dimensions of kidney exchange: (i) uncertainty over the existence of
possible trades, (ii) balancing efficiency and fairness, and (iii) inherent
dynamism. For each dimension, we design scalable branch-and-price-based
integer programming market clearing methods. Next, we combine these
dimensions, along with high-level human-provided guidance, into a unified
framework for learning to match in a general dynamic setting. This
framework, which we coin FutureMatch, takes as input a high-level objective
(e.g., "maximize graft survival of transplants over time") decided on by
experts, then automatically learns based on data how to make this objective
concrete and learns the "means" to accomplish this goal—a task that, in our
experience, humans handle poorly.

We complement our theoretical models and claims with extensive experiments
on real data from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Kidney Paired
Donation Pilot Program, a large kidney exchange clearinghouse consisting of
60% of the transplant centers in the US. The UNOS exchange uses our
algorithms and software to autonomously match donors to patients twice per
week.

Best,

Ellen and Ariel
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