Ilya Shpitser

Ilya Shpitser, a John C. Malone Associate Professor in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Computer Science, works on causal and semiparametric inference, missing data, and algorithmic fairness—ubiquitous data complications that may arise in datasets of all types, such as those obtained from social networks, electronic medical records, criminal justice databases, or longitudinal studies.

His methods yield principled approaches to detecting and addressing disparities and algorithmic bias, understanding causal pathways, and making appropriate causal inferences in settings where observations are systematically censored, unobserved confounders are present, observed realizations are correlated, or the problem is sufficiently complex that simple parametric approaches are unrealistic. The goal of his work is to allow inferences about cause-effect relationships to be made from complex, high-dimensional observational data, which is a crucial task in the empirical sciences and rational decision-making.

Recent applications of Shpitser’s work include the analysis of adherence in HIV patients, investigating the association between highly active antiretroviral therapy in pregnant women and birth defects, and developing predictive models and dimension reduction strategies using oncology data. His research also examines corrections for discriminatory bias in criminal justice data and learning predictors and causes of adverse outcomes in cardiac surgery patients.

In 2017, Shpitser was honored with the Causality in Statistics Education Award by the American Statistical Association for his annual course on causal inference for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in data-science-allied disciplines: computer science, statistics, public health, social science, and economics. In 2019, he co-organized a tutorial on graphical methods for identification at the Atlantic Causal Inference Conference. Among his invited presentations are the 2018 Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Causal Inference Workshop, the 2018 DARPA Ground Truth program, the 2019 Harvard Applied Statistics Workshop, and the 2019 Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics Workshop on Models and Machine Learning for Causal Inference and Decision Making in Health Research.

Shpitser serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Causal Inference and is a member of the research advisory board at Arnold Ventures, a limited liability company for research and evidence-based methods. He is also a senior program committee member for the International Conference on Machine Learning and the Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems. Shpitser additionally reviews for the Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research, among others. He has also authored numerous papers and several book chapters, including for the Handbook of Graphical Models (Chapman & Hall, 2018).

Shpitser received his BA in computer science and mathematics (1999) from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS (2004) and PhD (2008) in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He completed postdoctoral fellowships in the computer science departments at UCLA and Harvard University. Before joining Johns Hopkins, Shpitser was a lecturer in statistics at the University of Southampton in the U.K.