# Tuomas Sandholm

Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Title:  “Modern Organ Exchanges: Algorithms, Market Designs, and Opportunities”

Abstract: In kidney exchanges, patients with kidney disease can obtain compatible donors by “swapping” their own willing but incompatible donors. In modern kidney exchanges these “swaps” are conducted via cycles of donor-patient pairs and never-ending altruist-initiated chains. Our algorithms autonomously make the transplant plan twice a week for the UNOS national kidney exchange that has 153 transplant centers, and have been used by two private exchanges. In this talk I will summarize the state of the art in algorithms for the batch problem, approaches for the dynamic problem where pairs and altruists arrive and depart, techniques that find the highest-expected-quality solution under the real challenge of unforeseen pre-transplant incompatibilities, approaches for dynamic compatibility testing, and approaches for striking the fairness-efficiency tradeoff. I will describe the FUTUREMATCH framework that combines these elements and uses data and supercomputing to learn a concrete objective from high-level human value judgments. I will also discuss new directions in allowing more than one donor to donate on behalf of a patient, and integrating the deceased-donor waiting list with kidney exchange. Finally, similar approaches could be used to set up exchanges for liver lobes and cross-organ exchanges. Different parts of this work are joint with dozens of different collaborators, as detailed in the presentation.

Bio: Tuomas Sandholm is Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Computer Science Department, with affiliate professor appointments in the Machine Learning Department, Ph.D. Program in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO), and CMU/UPitt Joint Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. He is the Founder and Director of the Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory. He has published over 450 papers. In parallel with his academic career, he is a serial entrepreneur. He is Founder and CEO of Optimized Markets, Inc., that is bringing a new, optimization-powered paradigm to advertising campaign sales and scheduling—in TV (linear and nonlinear), display, mobile, game, radio, and cross-media advertising. He was Founder, Chairman, and CTO/Chief Scientist of CombineNet, Inc. from 1997 until its acquisition in 2010. During this period the company commercialized over 800 of the world's largest-scale generalized combinatorial multi-attribute auctions, with over $60 billion in total spend and over$6 billion in generated savings. He has served as consultant or board member for Baidu, Yahoo!, Google, Chicago Board Options Exchange, swap.com, Granata Decision Systems, and others. He has developed the leading algorithms for several game classes; they won the two most recent world championships in computer Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold&rsquo;em. Among his honors are the NSF Career Award, inaugural ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award, Sloan Fellowship, Carnegie Science Center Award for Excellence, Edelman Laureateship, and Computers and Thought Award. He is Fellow of the ACM, AAAI, and INFORMS. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich.