Ryan Shi

Volunteer Engagement for Food Security

Working with Food Rescue Hero, we developed a series of AI-based tools to make sure that as many food donations reach the underprivileged communities as possible. Our work has gone through user studies and randomized trials, and has been deployed in the real world.

Predicting and Presenting Task Difficulty for Crowdsourcing Food Rescue Platforms
Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Jiayin Zhi, Siqi Zeng, Zhicheng Zhang, Ameesh Kapoor, Sean Hudson, Hong Shen, Fei Fang
WWW-24: The 2024 ACM Web Conference
[Short video]

A Recommender System for Crowdsourcing Food Rescue Platforms
Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Leah Lizarondo, Fei Fang
WWW-21: The 2021 ACM Web Conference
Part of book chapter in AI for Social Impact

Improving Efficiency of Volunteer-Based Food Rescue Operations
Zheyuan Ryan Shi*, Yiwen Yuan*, Kimberly Lo, Leah Lizarondo, Fei Fang
IAAI-20: 32nd Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Media Monitoring for Environmental Conservation

Working with World Wildlife Fund, we developed a set of tools powered by cutting edge language models to detect events that could pose a threat to conservation goals. Our tools have been adopted by WWF teams in multiple countries, monitoring 60K+ protected areas worldwide.

Where It Really Matters: Few-Shot Environmental Conservation Media Monitoring for Low-Resource Languages
Sameer Jain, Sedrick Scott Keh, Shova Chhetri, Karun Dewan, Pablo Izquierdo, Johanna Prussmann, Pooja Shrestha, César Suárez, Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Lei Li, Fei Fang
AAAI-24: The 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

NewsPanda: Media Monitoring for Timely Conservation Action
Sedrick Scott Keh*, Zheyuan Ryan Shi*, David J. Patterson, Nirmal Bhagabati, Karun Dewan, Areendran Gopala, Pablo Izquierdo, Debojyoti Mallick, Ambika Sharma, Pooja Shrestha, Fei Fang
IAAI-23: 35th Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Winner of IAAI Deployed Application Award

Use-inspired Technical AI Research

Specializing in multi-agent systems and sequential decision making, we develop generalizable models and methods to tackle the shared pain points we observed in diverse application areas.

Global Rewards in Restless Multi-Armed Bandits
Naveen Raman, Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Fei Fang
NeurIPS-24: the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Bandit Data-Driven Optimization
Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Rayid Ghani, Fei Fang
AAAI-22: the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
[Full version] [Source code]

Designing the Game to Play: Optimizing Payoff Structure in Security Games
Zheyuan Ryan Shi*, Ziye Tang*, Long Tran-Thanh, Rohit Singh, Fei Fang
IJCAI-18: the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
[Full version] [Source code]