Ariel Procaccia is descended from a “dynasty of professors.” His grandfather, uncle, and cousin are law professors, and his father, “‘the black sheep,’ who studied exact science,” broke the mold by becoming a physics professor.
Procaccia doesn’t mind that he was “destined” to become a professor. “What other job gives you absolute freedom to do the things that you find most interesting and work with some of the smartest people in the world?” he rhetorically asks.
On his way to earning his PhD in computer science, he discovered where his subsequent research, career, and academic passion would spring from: the “spirited intersection” of two fields, what he calls the “dynamic duo” of artificial intelligence and economics, a combination that he points out entails groundbreaking technology and societal impact.
As an assistant professor in CMU’s School of Computer Science since 2011, he embraces that combination to tackle problems such as protecting critical infrastructure sites, using voting rules for crowdsourcing, or facilitating kidney transplants by finding medically compatible donors.
For the work he does, he was named one of “AI’s 10 to Watch,” by IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine, a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to advancing the theory, practice, and application of computer and information-processing science and technology. The list is compiled every two years, and those selected are researchers who have completed their doctoral work in the past five years and already have made impressive research contributions.
