Garcia Research
About Alfredo Garcia
Alfredo Garcia is Professor and Chair of the Department of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia. His research asks how systems of interacting decision-makers — people, organizations, and increasingly AI agents — learn, respond to incentives, and can be designed to work well together. He began by studying strategic behavior in engineered markets and networks, using game theory and dynamic optimization to design pricing and allocation mechanisms for electricity markets and telecommunications. That same focus now drives his work on AI: inferring what people want from how they act in order to align large language models with human feedback, and modeling human attention and decision-making so that people and automation can work together safely. His work draws on reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, game theory, and distributed optimization, and has appeared in Operations Research, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Human Factors, and NeurIPS and ICLR.
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Research
Research areas, from AI alignment and human-AI teaming to distributed optimization and markets, with selected publications.
Full Biography
Alfredo Garcia received B.Sc in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia in 1991, D.E.A in Automatique et Informatique Industrielle from the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France in 1992, and Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1997. From 1998 to 2000, he served as Commissioner in the Colombian Energy Regulatory Commission, and from 2001 to 2017 he was a member of the faculty at the University of Virginia and the University of Florida.
During 2016-2017, he served as Program Manager for the “Multi-Agent Network Control” program with the Army Research Office (ARO) at Research Triangle Park, NC. He previously held the Mike and Sugar Barnes Endowed Professorship III with the Industrial & Systems Engineering Department, Texas A&M University.