Tony Qin

Bio:

Tony Qin is Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Eva AI (foreva.ai). He was Principal Scientist at Lyft and Director of the Decision Intelligence group at DiDi AI Labs, spearheaded the development of reinforcement learning (RL) for rideshare marketplace optimization. Tony received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University. He is Associate Editor of the ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation Systems. He has served as Area Chair/Senior PC of KDD, AAAI, and ECML-PKDD, and a referee of top journals.  He is an INFORMS Franz Edelman Award Finalist and Laureate in 2023 and received the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice in 2019.

Title of talk:

RL and agents for operations

Abstract of talk:

In this talk, we will first review the core developments in reinforcement learning (RL) for rideshare dispatch operations and draw connections to approximate DP through the lens of system value decomposition in the multi-agent setting. If time allows, we will also describe the emerging problem of using LLM-based agents to automate operations for small businesses.