Alex Slivkins
Senior Principal Researcher
About
I am a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York City. Previously I was a researcher at MSR Silicon Valley (opens in new tab) lab (now defunct), after receiving my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell and a postdoc at Brown.
My research interests span machine learning theory, algorithmic economics, and networks. I am particularly interested in multi-armed bandits and exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and their manifestations in socioeconomic environments and generative AI. Much of my earlier research was on the analysis of Internet and social networks, metric embeddings, and distance/routing data structures. My work has been recognized with the best paper award at ACM EC 2010, the best paper nomination at WWW 2015, and the best student paper award at ACM PODC 2005.
Full publication list (opens in new tab) (with abstracts, by year and by topic / research program).
My book, Introduction to Multi-Armed Bandits, provides a textbook-like treatment of the subject.
- Latest revision (opens in new tab) (Jan 2022) can be found on arXiv.
- Published (opens in new tab) (Nov 2019) with Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning (opens in new tab).
- Book announcements: in SIGEcom Exchanges (opens in new tab) and on MSR blog.
Relevant groups at MSR: Economics and Computation and Machine Learning & AI | NYC.
Looking for an intern for Summer 2026! (PhD students only.) Please apply (opens in new tab) and email me if you think we’d be a good match.
Former interns: Natalie Collina (opens in new tab) (2025), Kiarash Banihashem (opens in new tab) (2025), Keegan Harris (opens in new tab) (2023, 2024), Mengxiao Zhang (opens in new tab) (2022), Sarath Pathatil (opens in new tab) (2022), Lequn Wang (opens in new tab) (2022), Yingkai Li (opens in new tab) (2021), Max Simchowitz (opens in new tab) (2020), Chara Podimata (opens in new tab) (2020), Mahsa Derakhshan (opens in new tab) (2019), Karthik Abinav Sankararaman (opens in new tab) (2018), Jieming Mao (opens in new tab) (2018), Manish Raghavan (opens in new tab) (2017), Mathias Lecuyer (opens in new tab) (2017), Steven Wu (opens in new tab) (2015, 2016), Chien-Ju Ho (opens in new tab) (2013, 2014), Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru (opens in new tab) (2012, 2013), Sigal Oren (opens in new tab) (2011), Shiri Chechik (opens in new tab) (2010), Yogeshwer Sharma (opens in new tab) (2008).