I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, with secondary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Intelligent Systems Program. I work with public sector organizations to address societal challenges in food security, healthcare, and poverty alleviation using AI. Some of my research has been deployed at these organizations worldwide.
I was the recipient of a 2026 Amazon Research Award, 2025 and 2024 Google Academic Research Awards, the 2024 Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, and a 2022 Siebel Scholar Award. I was named to the 2025 AAAI New Faculty Highlights and the 2022 Rising Star in Data Science and ML & AI lists by UChicago and USC.
Previously, I consulted for DataKind and interned at Microsoft and Facebook. I got my Ph.D. in Societal Computing from Carnegie Mellon University advised by Fei Fang, and a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Swarthmore College.
- ryanshi@pitt.edu
- Sennott Square 5415
- Google Scholar
Recent News
- Received an NIH NICHD-R01 grant.
- Script gap paper accepted to EMNLP-26.
- Won an OpenAI Research Access Grant.
- Food rescue RCT paper accepted to INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics.
- We were selected as a runner-up of the 2026 Laude Moonshots in healthcare!
- Won a 2026 Amazon Research Award.
Deployed Research
Working with Food Rescue Hero, we built a set of tools that predict which food rescue requests are at risk and design a volunteer notification scheme around them. In use by 412 Food Rescue since February 2020, serving over 45k volunteers and 8k community organizations, and helping distribute over 124 million pounds of food. Built on AWS.
A toolkit that automatically detects and analyzes online articles about environmental conservation and infrastructure construction. Deployed by World Wide Fund for Nature teams in the UK, India, and Nepal since February 2022, monitoring 60K+ protected areas. The follow-up, NewsSerow, has been deployed with WWF Nepal and Colombia since 2023. Winner of the 2023 IAAI Deployed Application Award and Google AI for Good award funding.