Tuomas Sandholm

Tuomas Sandholm is Angel Jordan University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a serial entrepreneur. His research focuses on the convergence of artificial intelligence, economics, and operations research. He is Co-Director of CMU AI. He is the Founder and Director of the Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed papers, holds 22 US patents, and his h-index is 85. In addition to his main appointment in the Computer Science Department, he holds 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 has built optimization-powered electronic marketplaces since 1989, and has fielded several of his systems. In parallel with his academic career, he was Founder, Chairman, first CEO, 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 is Founder and CEO of Optimized Markets, Inc., which is bringing a new optimization-powered paradigm to advertising campaign sales, pricing, and scheduling - in TV (linear and nonlinear), Internet display, streaming (video and audio), mobile, game, and cross-media advertising.

Since 2010, his algorithms have been running the national kidney exchange for the United Network for Organ Sharing, where they autonomously make the kidney exchange transplant plan for 80% of U.S. transplant centers together each week. He also co-invented never-ending altruist-donor-initiated chains and his algorithms created the first such chain. Such chains have become the main modality of kidney exchange worldwide and have led to around 10,000 life-saving transplants. He invented liver lobe and multi-organ exchanges, and the first liver-kidney swap took place in 2019.

Sandholm has developed the leading algorithms for several general classes of game with his students. The team that he leads is the multi-time world champion in computer heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em, which is the main benchmark and decades-open challenge problem for testing application-independent algorithms for solving imperfect-information games. Their AI Libratus became the first and only AI to beat top humans at that game. Then their AI Pluribus became the first and only AI to beat top humans at the multi-player game. That is the first superhuman milestone in any game beyond two-player zero-sum games. He is Founder and CEO of Strategic Machine, Inc., which provides solutions for strategic reasoning under imperfect information in a broad set of applications ranging from poker to other recreational games to business strategy, negotiation, strategic pricing, finance, cybersecurity, physical security, auctions, political campaigns, and medical treatment planning. He is also Founder and CEO of Strategy Robot, Inc., which focuses on defense, intelligence, and other government applications.

He served as the redesign consultant of Baidu’s sponsored search auctions and display advertising markets; within two years Baidu’s market cap increased 5x to $50 billion due to doubled monetization per user. He has served as consultant, advisor, or board member for Yahoo!, Google, Chicago Board Options Exchange, swap.com, Granata Decision Systems (now part of Google), Rare Crowds (now part of Media Math), and others.

He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science and a Dipl. Eng. (M.S. with B.S. included) with distinction in Industrial Engineering and Management Science. Among his many honors are the Minsky Medal, Computers and Thought Award, inaugural ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award, CMU’s Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, Carnegie Science Center Award for Excellence, and Edelman Laureateship. He is Fellow of the ACM, AAAI, and INFORMS. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich.