Vassilis Digalakis Jr

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the Information Systems and Operations Management Department at HEC Paris, with an affiliation with Hi! Paris, the joint HEC Paris, IP Paris, and Inria center on data analytics and artificial intelligence for science, business, and society. I completed my Ph.D. in Operations Research at the Operations Research Center at MIT in 2023, advised by Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas. 

Research summary.   I develop analytics and interpretable machine learning methodologies to facilitate the adoption of data-driven decision support tools in high-stakes applications, primarily in sustainability and healthcare. I have collaborated, among others, with OCP, the world's largest producer of phosphate and phosphate-based products, to develop an optimization framework that guides their $2Bn investment in solar panels and batteries; and with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help them decide on locations for COVID-19 mass vaccination centers and state-level allocation policy. From a technical standpoint, I employ techniques from optimization (especially mixed-integer, convex, and robust) and statistics to create reliable models that are (i) inherently interpretable, (ii) able to capture the underlying problem structure (e.g., temporal or spatial variability, sparsity, etc.), (iii) stable in the face of small changes in the data, (iv) robust to uncertainty, and (v) scalable for large or massive problem sizes. 

• Selected papers:

  1. Slowly varying regression under sparsity (major revision in Operations Research)

  2. Decarbonizing OCP (minor revision in  M&SOM & finalist in M&SOM Practice-Based Research Competition)

• Overview of my research projects

If you are interested in the above, please do not hesitate to reach out!

Teaching.   I have taught and developed courses in operations management (HEC Paris, Operations and Supply Chain Management, Instructor), optimization (MIT, Robust Modeling, Optimization, and Computation; Head Teaching Assistant), analytics and machine learning (HEC, Interpretability and Algorithmic Fairness, Guest Lecturer; MIT, Machine Learning under a Modern Optimization Lens, Teaching Assistant; MIT, The Analytics Edge), computing (MIT, Computing in Optimization and Statistics), and introductory mathematics (TUC, Mathematics I) at various levels (undergraduate, MSc, PhD, MBA) and backgrounds (data science, business, engineering, business law).

Early days.   My journey has also included the Alexa Entertainment Spoken Language Understanding team at Amazon Science, where I spent the 2021 summer as a Research Scientist Intern, and the Technical University of Crete, Greece, where I earned my Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2018 (Valedictorian). I am originally from the beautiful city of Chania, Crete, Greece (see header image — surprised by the snow-capped White Mountains? We Cretans are known to be avid skiers). A long, long time ago, I played the drums in a prog-rock band.