INFORMS IMPACT PRIZE

Citi Field, the new stadium for New York Mets, opened in March last year, and baseball fans visiting the rotunda can now read from its interior wall an inscription dedicated to Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player in Major League Baseball:“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” 

The question of impact cannot escape our own profession, since we bring to the forefront all different types of analytics for the purpose of enabling better decision-making. And, indeed, we have been quite successful – boasting stories ranging from how the course of World War II was changed to how struggling airline businesses have survived stormy weather, to offering the promise of expanding affordable health care without excessive cost. Operations research is the science of better.

One of the ways INFORMS recognizes contributions having positive impact on our field is through the eponymous INFORMS Impact Prize. This prize is intended to highlight a tool, methodology or concept that has had wide-ranging impact on practice and society,with a very broad scope. It could be a certain modeling framework or technique that can be used in an extensive range of applications. It could be a
software tool that enables managers to access the benefits of operations research. Or it could be key concepts that have been effective in communicating and mobilizing changes in business operations. The prize is given to those who originate new ideas, those who play significant roles in bringing the ideas to application or a combination of both.

Prize Honors Ideas

There are other similar INFORMS awards for contributions having positive practical effects. The Franz Edelman Award recognizes excellence in a single application of management science and operations research in practice,with verifiable and quantifiable impact. The INFORMS Prize (not to be confused with the Impact Prize) is geared towards industry champions ushering in effective implementation of operation research to a particular organization’s decision-making process. In contrast, the Impact Prize honors ideas that are widely used and broadly applicable.

The Impact Prize has been awarded once every two years since 2004. In its initial year, it was given to Bob Bixby, Janet Lowe and Paul Green. Bixby created a software code for linear programming, and together with Lowe started the business that successfully marketed CPLEX, the nearly ubiquitous generalpurpose optimization software. The prize was shared with Green, who originated conjoint analysis in market research and also helped the dissemination of this technique through papers, books and commercial software packages. It is difficult to think of mathematical programming optimization, or applied preference theory, without appreciating the contributions of Bixby, Lowe and Green.

In 2006, the Impact Prize was given to Abraham Charnes and William W. Cooper for their contribution of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), broadly applicable for assessing an operational process’s performance without imposing explicit modeling assumptions. DEA is a data-oriented method of estimating production frontiers based on mathematical programming; it has been used by manufacturing firms, hospitals, schools and investment portfolio managers, among others. The most recent INFORMS Impact Prize winner, in 2008, was Thomas L. Saaty. Saaty was recognized for the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a methodological paradigm for assisting managers to make multi-criteria decisions. Like DEA,AHP has transformed the way we approach complex decisions. There are thousands of reported AHP applications in the public and private sectors.

Can you think of other examples of contributions that have made a broad impact on our field? The competition for the 2010 INFORMS Impact Prize is now open. The Impact Prize committee is accepting nominations in a twophase submission process. For the first phase, applicants are asked to submit a brief (at most one page) nomination identifying the potential recipient(s) along with a brief summary of their contribution, and its impact. This is due on June 28. Promising entries will then be invited to submit a complete nomination containing additional supporting information, with the second deadline of July 26. Nominees who do not receive the award this year will be retained for future consideration.

If you have any questions, please contact any of the members of the Impact Prize committee: Alan Scheller-Wolf ([email protected]), chair, Srinivas Bollapragada ([email protected]. com), Tim Huh ([email protected]. ca), Steve Strauss ([email protected]) and Geert-Jan van Houtum (G.J.v.Houtum@ tue.nl).We on the committee look forward to your submission.