UNDERGRADUATE OPERATIONS RESEARCH PRIZE

The INFORMS Board recently approved a new Undergraduate Operations Research Prize. The purpose of the prize is to honor a student or group of students who have conducted a significant applied project and/or original and important theoretical or applied research in operations research or management science, broadly defined, while enrolled as an undergraduate student. This could be research conducted as part of a course, research assistantship, independent study project, internship or senior thesis.

The prize will be presented for the first time at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, in November.

To enter, eligible participants should submit a paper to Prize Committee Chairperson Susan Martonosi ([email protected]) by July 1. The prize will include $500 plus travel support to the INFORMS Annual Meeting. All entrants satisfying the eligibility requirements will be invited to present their research at an Undergraduate Research Showcase session(s) at the annual meeting.

Joel Sokol, Dawn Strickland, David Czerwinski and Amy Cohn join Martonosi on the Prize Committee.

Eligibility

The following conditions must be met for eligibility:

1. Entrants must submit a paper (can be previously published or unpublished) presenting original research results.

2. The entrants are defined to be any coauthors on this paper who were enrolled as undergraduate students for at least one term within the 12 months prior to the award submission deadline in the year the paper is submitted for consideration, and who were undergraduate students at the time the project or research was conducted. The student(s) must have made a substantial contribution to the project and been the primary author(s) of the paper with only minor editorial assistance.

3. One or more faculty, graduate student or post-doctoral advisors may appear as co-authors of a paper, but at least one student entrant must be the first author.

4. A brief statement confirming the entrants’ eligibility and detailing the entrants’ contribution to the research should be submitted by the entrants’ research advisor or another faculty member familiar with the entrants’ work. To encourage cross-discipline submissions,
the faculty advisor need not be an INFORMS member.

5. An entrant can be a (co-)author in at most one paper submitted to the competition.

6. The paper must not have won a prize in a previous year of this competition.

The entire paper (including bibliography, appendices, figures, etc.) must not exceed 25 pages and, except for those containing references, each page should contain no more than 35 lines of text. Attached to the paper should be an abstract of the work, not to exceed 100 words. This abstract will be used in the program for the Undergraduate Research Showcase session of the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

The criteria for review include:

1. For applied projects: Is the work significant? Did it require the clever use of O.R. methodology, and did it create substantial value for the project sponsor?

2. For research: Is the research novel? For example, does it address a new problem (theoretical or applied) of interest to the broader O.R. community, does it present a novel solution or modeling approach to an established problem,or does it provide new insight into an important problem?

3. Does the students’ work demonstrate creativity and promise for future work in the field of operations research?

4. Writing quality: Is the writing coherent, fluid and adhering to a clear structure? Is the problem clearly explained and motivated? Is terminology clearly defined and notation consistent with accepted conventions?