David Sontag
Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); Associate Professor, Medical Engineering

Who they work with
David Sontag is a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and head of the Clinical Machine Learning Group. He is also an investigator at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research focuses on advancing machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, and using those tools to transform health care. He and his group develop algorithms that use data to make better clinical predictions; create novel methods for answering causal queries that work effectively with high-dimensional data; and are building a foundation for the next-generation of intelligent electronic health records.
Selected Publications
- Mozannar, H., Lang, H., Wei, D., Sattigeri, P., Das, S., Sontag, D. (2023). Who Should Predict? Exact Algorithms For Learning to Defer to Humans. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS).
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Oberst, M., Johansson, F., Wei, D., Gao, T., Brat, G., Sontag, D., Varshney, K. (2020). Characterization of Overlap in Observational Studies. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS).
- Oberst, M., Sontag, D. (2019). Counterfactual Off-Policy Evaluation with Gumbel-Max Structural Causal Models. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
- Johansson, F., Sontag, D., Ranganath, R. (2019). Support and Invertibility in Domain-Invariant Representations. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS).
- Lang, H., Sontag, D., Vijayaraghavan, A. (2018) Optimality of Approximate Inference Algorithms on Stable Instances. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS).
- Chen, I., Johansson, F., Sontag, D. (2018). Why is My Classifier Discriminatory?. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
Media
- January 9, 2020: MIT News, How well can computers connect symptoms to diseases?
- July 24, 2019: MIT News, Want to know what software-driven health care looks like? This class offers some clues.
- July 21, 2019: MIT News, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands tours MIT.
- May 10, 2018: MIT News, The tenured engineers of 2018.