Devavrat Shah Named an IEEE Fellow

Among the newly selected Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) are three members of the MIT community: Harry Asada, Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Luca Daniel, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Devavrat Shah, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization, annually confers the rank of Fellow on senior members whose body of work has advanced innovation in their respective fields and whose involvement in the engineering community has furthered the IEEE mission of promoting technology to benefit society.

Devavrat Shah is a member of both the Laboratory for Information and Decision Sciences (LIDS) and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). He was the founding director of the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC) at MIT from 2016 to 2020. Shah’s research focuses on statistical inference and stochastic networks, including resource allocation in communications networks; inference and learning on graphical models; algorithms for social data processing including ranking, recommendations, and crowdsourcing; and more recently causal inference. Shah received his bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and his PhD in computer science from Stanford University. In 2013, he founded the machine learning start-up Celect, Inc., which helps retailers with optimizing inventory by accurate demand forecasting. In August 2019, Celect, Inc. was acquired by Nike, Inc. In 2019, Shah founded Ikigai Labs, with the mission of building self-driving organizations by empowering data business operators to make data-driven decisions with ease of spreadsheets. Shah’s work has received broad recognition, including the Rising Star Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for the computer systems performance evaluation community (SIGMETRICS); the Erlang Prize from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS; the Best Publication Award from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS; Best Paper Award from Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society of INFORMS; INFOCOM Best Paper Award, N(eur)IPS Best Paper Award; and the ACM SIGMETRICS Best Paper Award. He has received the 2019 and 2020 ACM SIGMETRICS Test-of-Time Paper award, as well as the NSF CAREER Award, and he is a distinguished alumni of his alma mater IIT Bombay. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow “for contributions to network and information science, inference and machine learning”.

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