Alex Psomas

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science

Purdue University

Hall of Data Science and AI (DSAI) 2144

email: ''apsomas'' at ''purdue'' dot ''edu''

About

My name is Alexandros Psomas (I mostly go by Alex). I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. I am also affiliated with the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).

My research develops algorithms and mechanisms for allocating scarce resources among people whose preferences are private, strategic, and imperfectly known. As AI systems increasingly allocate resources and act on people's behalf, fairness and incentive alignment have become fundamental for trustworthy AI: an AI system is trustworthy only if it treats participants fairly and aligns their incentives with its goals. I use tools from algorithms, game theory, and machine learning to formalize these requirements and establish rigorous guarantees; my work spans fair division, mechanism design, computational social choice, and online algorithms. I pursue "theory through deployment": building real-world systems reveals new theoretical questions, and theoretical advances guide system design. My group has built and deployed systems with non-profit organizations such as the Indy Hunger Network, Last Mile Food Rescue, the Food Finders Food Bank, and 412 Food Rescue

I completed my PhD in May 2017 in the Theory of Computation group at UC Berkeley, where I was extremely fortunate to be advised by Christos Papadimitriou. I have worked as a Visiting Researcher in the market algorithms group in Google Research (Mountain View) during the Spring and Summer of 2020. I spent Fall 2019 as a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Prior to that I spent two wonderful years (2017-2019) as a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, hosted by Ariel Procaccia.

NEWs

Nov 2026: New Purdue University News article about our work with food organizations in Ohio and Indiana! If you are a food organization interested in launching Food Drop in your state, check out this demo, made by the awesome Athina Terzoglou (who is on the job market this year!), and please reach out to us!
May 2026: Food Drop has now expanded to Ohio! In collaboration with Last Mile Food Rescue, we launched a pilot to support the efficient and fair distribution of large food donations across the Cincinnati area. (paper)