Kirthevasan (Kirthi) Kandasamy

About

Kirthevasan Kandasamy is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with an affiliation in the Department of Statistics. His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and game theory. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2025. Prior to his current position, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the RISE Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Ion Stoica, Mike Jordan, and Joey Gonzalez. He completed his PhD in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University under the co-advisement of Jeff Schneider and Barnabas Poczos. During his PhD, he was supported by a Facebook fellowship (2017/18), a Siebel scholarship (2017/18), and a CMU Presidential fellowship (2015/16). Before attending Carnegie Mellon University, he earned a B.Sc in Electronics & Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Parallel computing
• Operating system
• Distributed computing
• Physics

Selected publications

• Climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation: a review of progress and key issues in global carbon markets and potential impacts on ecosystems

  2024-07-17 · 2 citations

  review

  Global climate mitigation policies are promoting a radical shift in emission reduction activities to achieve net-zero targets by 2050. Although recent scientific studies have explored the impacts of some climate mitigation initiatives on biodiversity in various contexts, a global perspective of these developments is required. This report contributes to these needs and includes a current synopsis of the carbon market mechanisms implemented around the world, how these mechanisms are related to nat…

  PublisherDOI

• Nash Incentive-compatible Online Mechanism Learning via Weakly Differentially Private Online Learning

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-07-06 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We study a multi-round mechanism design problem, where we interact with a set of agents over a sequence of rounds. We wish to design an incentive-compatible (IC) online learning scheme to maximize an application-specific objective within a given class of mechanisms, without prior knowledge of the agents' type distributions. Even if each mechanism in this class is IC in a single round, if an algorithm naively chooses from this class on each round, the entire learning process may not be IC against…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mechanism Design for Collaborative Normal Mean Estimation

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Constrained Best Arm Identification with Tests for Feasibility

  Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2026-03-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Best arm identification (BAI) aims to identify the highest- performance arm among a set of K arms by collecting stochastic samples from each arm. In real-world problems, the best arm needs to satisfy additional feasibility constraints. While there is limited prior work on BAI with feasibility constraints, they typically assume the performance and con- straints are observed simultaneously on each pull of an arm. However, this assumption does not reflect most practical use cases, e.g., in drug dis…

  PublisherDOI

• Pairwise Exchanges of Freely Replicable Goods with Negative Externalities

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-03-12

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We study a setting where a set of agents engage in pairwise exchanges of freely replicable goods (e.g., digital goods such as data), where two agents grant each other a copy of a good they possess in exchange for a good they lack. Such exchanges introduce a fundamental tension: while agents benefit from acquiring additional goods, they incur negative externalities when others do the same. This dynamic typically arises in real-world scenarios where competing entities may benefit from selective co…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Barnabás Póczos

  59 shared

• Jeff Schneider

  45 shared

• Joseph E. Gonzalez

  Berkeley College

  23 shared

• Ion Stoica

  23 shared

• Gautam Dasarathy

  23 shared

• Michael I. Jordan

  19 shared

• Junier B. Oliva

  19 shared

• Akshay Krishnamurthy

  13 shared

Labs

• Kandasamy Research LabPI

Education

• B.S., Electronics & Telecommunications Engineering

  University of Moratuwa

• Ph.D.

  Carnegie Mellon University

• M.S.

  University of California, Berkeley

Awards & honors

• NSF CAREER Award

Similar researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Yong Jae Leeh-90
• Somesh Jhah-69
• Michael Gleicherh-62