LIDS Research

The physical world and the social systems that shape human life evolve through complex and deeply interconnected dynamics that we are only beginning to understand. These systems are fundamental to our lives—from transportation and energy networks to biological and economic systems—and they increasingly interact with computing in powerful ways.

At LIDS, we are inspired by the opportunity to harness computing to deepen our understanding of these complex systems and to design technologies that improve the physical world, enrich human interactions, and ultimately expand what humans can achieve. We are motivated to develop computing systems that can make intelligent decisions within physical, societal and sustainable systems.

These new computing paradigms will not only need to be more autonomous and agentic, but they will also need to show success far beyond metrics like prediction accuracy. They will have to better incorporate physical constraints, societal preferences, and sustainable choices.

The intellectual foundation of this work spans learning, optimization, control, and strategic reasoning — the core disciplines of decision-making under uncertainty. These tools yield formal guarantees for autonomous systems, networks, and critical infrastructure, and extend naturally toward algorithms that shape human interactions and societal outcomes at scale. Building on these foundations, we develop practical algorithms, create deployable systems, and collaborate directly with application domains — from energy grids and healthcare to transportation, economics, and the life sciences — bringing principled approaches to fields where intelligent decision-making can be transformative.

Our focus areas represent the key pillars of this vision. Each brings together a broad set of important challenges whose solutions are essential for enabling a world in which computing is deeply embedded in the physical world and the social fabric of human life.

Our research fields reflect the foundational areas of scholarship that our researchers are advancing and shaping to address these challenges. These research fields span a wide intellectual spectrum—from statistics, optimization, and information theory to reinforcement learning and behavioral science.

Across a diverse set of impact areas, LIDS research is motivated by pressing societal challenges, emerging technological opportunities, and critical needs across industry and society. Inspired by real-world applications, our work aims to generate transformative advances that improve systems central to human life and expand the possibilities of what computing can achieve.