Mateo Dulce Rubio
¡Hola! I am an Assistant Professor & Faculty Fellow at the NYU Center for Data Science. I recently completed a PhD in Statistics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Edward H. Kennedy, where I received the William W. Cooper Doctoral Dissertation Award for my thesis “Robust Nonparametric Methods for Peacebuilding.”
My research develops flexible and robust statistical tools for humanitarian and policy applications, advancing methods from nonparametric statistics, causal inference, mathematical optimization, and responsible machine learning. Specifically, I focus on:
- Localized decision-making and geographic resource allocation under low-quality data. I actively work on ML/OR-powered tools to support planning and prioritization in humanitarian mine action, in partnership with UNOPS and local demining organizations. My work has been deployed in real-world operations in Colombia and Afghanistan and recognized by INFORMS, GICHD, ITU, and Kluz PeaceTech.
- Doubly-robust ML estimators for causal inference under missing data, and for population size estimation with heterogeneous capture probabilities and recapture dependencies, with applications in conservation, public health, and human rights.
- Principled statistical methods for responsible AI systems. I develop general frameworks to address key challenges in algorithmic decision-support systems with theoretical guarantees, including selection bias, counterfactual allocation, underreported events, anytime-valid differential privacy auditing, culturally-aware bias assessment in LLMs, and conformalized optimization with feasibility guarantees.
* Dulce is my first (paternal) last name and Rubio is my second (maternal) last name.
Recent News
| September 2025 | Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2025! "Conformal Mixed-Integer Constraint Learning with Feasibility Guarantees" (spotlight!) and "Sequentially Auditing Differential Privacy". |
| September 2025 | Our paper "SESGO: Spanish Evaluation of Stereotypical Generative Outputs" was accepted at AIES 2025 for an oral discussion panel. See you in Madrid! |
| September 2025 | Joined New York University as an Assistant Professor / Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science! |
| May 2025 | Honored to receive the William W. Cooper Doctoral Dissertation Award for my thesis "Robust Statistical Methods for Peacebuilding". |
| April 2025 | I was selected as Student of the Year by the American Statistical Association, Pittsburgh chapter. |
Selected Research Projects
NeurIPS,
2025
NeurIPS (spotlight!),
2025
AIES (oral discussion),
2025
The Annals of Applied Statistics,
2025
AI for Social Impact Book. Edited by Milind Tambe, Fei Fang & Bryan Wilder. https://ai4sibook.org/
AI4SI Book,
2022
Miscellaneous
During my PhD, I was a K&L Gates Presidential Fellow in Ethics and Computational Technologies, and worked at RAND Corporation and Apple on natural language processing and foundation models. Before that, I co-founded the Centro de Analítica para Políticas Públicas and worked at Quantil mostly on crime modeling research in Bogotá. My background is in Mathematics (BSc) and Economics (BSc, MSc cum laude) from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.