Milind Tambe is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of Center for Research in Computation and Society at Harvard University; concurrently, he is also Director "AI for Social Good" at Google Research India. Prof. Tambe's work  focuses on advancing AI at its intersection with areas of public health, conservation and public safety. He is recipient of the IJCAI (International Joint Conferenceon AI) John McCarthy Award (2018), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Autonomous Agents Research Award (2005), AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)  Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award (2019), and he is a fellow of AAAI (2007) and ACM (2013). He is also a recipient of the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award(2010), the INFORMS Wagner prize for excellence in Operations Research practice (2012), the Rist Prize of the Military Operations Research Society (2011), IBM Faculty Award(2012), Okawa foundation faculty research award (2004), the RoboCup scientific challenge award(1999), Orange County Engineering Council Outstanding Project Achievement Award (2015), and several others.

Prof. Tambe has contributed several foundational papers in Artificial Intelligence in areas of agents and multiagent systems and computational game theory, for which he has received influential paper and best paper awards at a number of premier Artificial Intelligence Conferences and workshops, such as IJCAI, AAMAS and others. This research has led to significant practical impact, such as use of the green security games framework to assist wildlife conservation around the world, use of social networks and machine learning to assist in improving public health outcomes such as HIV prevention, and the use of pioneering security games research for security optimization by agencies such as the US Coast Guard and the Federal Air Marshals Service. 

A key example is the PAWS AI system developed by him and his team  that has been deployed in collaboration with wildlife conservation agencies to assist rangers around the world in protecting endagered wildlife. Other examples include research in collaboration with NGOs for TB prevention, HIV prevention and improving maternal health care outcomes. This research has led him and his students to receive the US Coast Guard Meritorious Team Commendation from the Commandant (2013), Certificate of Appreciation from the US Federal Air Marshals Service (2011) and special commendation given by the Los Angeles World Airports police from the city of Los Angeles(2009).  Finally, his PAWS system was listed as "Top Tech" of 2018 by IEEE spectrum, and his work with algorithms for HIV prevention were listed by Mashable.com in their "26 incredible innovations that improved the world in 2015".

 

In 2013, based on their research, Prof. Tambe co-founded Avata Intelligence, which was acquired by Procore Technologies.