2015 INFORMS Subdivision Awards

Applied Probability

Best Publication in Applied Probability Award

Mohsen Bayati and Kavita Ramanan (l-r).

Recipients:
Mohsen Bayati, Marc Lelarge and Andrea Montanari
Recognized work:
“Universality in Polytope Phase Transitions and Message Passing Algorithms”

iFORM Best Paper Award

Saibal Ray, Haresh Gurnani, Mehmet Gumus and Brian Tomlin (l-r).

Recipients:
Mehmet Gümüs, Saibal Ray and Haresh Gurnani
Recognized work:
“Supply-side story: Risks, guarantees, competition and information asymmetry,” Management Science, Vol. 58, No. 9, 2012, pp. 1694-1714.

Aviation Applications
Dissertation Prize

Michael Bloem and David Lovell (l-r).

Recipient:
Michael Bloem, Stanford University
Recognized work:
“Optimization and Analytics for Air Traffic Management”

Service Management SIG
Best Paper Award

Andres Musalem, Brian Tomlin and Marcelo Olivares (l-r).

Recipients:
Yina Lu, Andres Musalem, Marcelo Olivares and Ariel Schilkrut
Recognized work:
“Measuring the Effect of Waiting Time on Customer Purchases”

Best Student Presentation

Chiwei Yan and Senay Solak (l-r).

Best Paper Award

Recipients:
Chen Peng, Feryal Erhun, Erik Hertzler and Karl Kempf
Recognized work:
“Capacity Planning in the Semiconductor Industry: Dual-Mode Procurement with Options”

Young Scholar Prize

Gabriel Weintraub and Brian Tomlin (l-r).

Recipients:
Baris Ata and Gabriel Weintraub

Behavioral Operations Management

Best Working Paper Award

Recipients:
Ernan Haruvy, Elena Katok and Valery Pavlov
Recognized work:
“Bargaining Process and Channel Efficiency”
Runner-up:
Tim Kraft, Leon Valdes, and Yanchong Zheng, “Transparency and Indirect Reciprocity in Social Responsibility: An Incentivized Experiment”

Honorable mention:
Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker, Karen L. Murrell and David R. Vinson, “Adopting Coworkers’ Best Practices: Public Relative Performance Feedback as a Tool for Standardizing Workflow”

Military Applications 2015 Koopman Prize

Bao Nguyen.

Recipients:
Bao Nguyen
Recognized work:
“Assessment of a Ballistic Missile Defense System”

Computing

ICS Harvey J. Greenberg  Service Award

Richard Barr (right) receives service award.

Recipient:
Richard Barr

Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military Applications

Ross Schuchard and L. Robin Keller (l-r).

INFORMS Computing Society Prize

Presentation of the ICS Prize.

Recipients:
Suvrajeet Sen, Dinakar Gade, Julia Higle, Simge Küçükyavuz, Lewis Ntaimo and Hanif Sherali

J. Steinhardt Prize

Keith Womer (center) receives Steinhardt Prize.

ICS Student Paper Award

Young Woong Park (left) receives ICS Student Paper Award.

Recipient:
Young Woong Park, Northwestern University
Recognized work:
“An Aggregate and Iterative Disaggregate Algorithm with Proven Optimality in Machine Learning”
Runners-up:
Xiao Liu, Ohio State University, “Decomposition Algorithms for Two-Stage Chance-Constrained Programs”; Leonardo Lozano, Clemson University, “A Backward Sampling Framework for Interdiction Problems with Fortification”; Jorge A. Sefair, University of Florida, “Dynamic Shortest-Path Interdiction”

Omega Rho Distinguished Lecturer

Margaret Brandeau.

CPMS: Practice Section of INFORMS

The Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research

Recipients:
Eva K. Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology; Fan Yuan, Georgia Institute of Technology; Bali Pulendran, Emory University; Helder Nakaya, Emory University; Troy Quere, Emory University; Greg Burel, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Ferdinand Pietz, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Bernard Benecke, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Recognized work:
“Machine Learning Framework for Predicting Vaccine Immunogenicity”

Optimization

Student Paper Prize

Paul Grigas (left) receives Student Paper Prize.

Recipient:
Paul Grigas
Recognized work:
“A new perspective on boosting in linear regression via subgradient optimization and relatives”
Honorable mention:
Ruoyu Sun, “Guaranteed matrix completion via non-convex factorization”; and Shimrit Shtern, “A semi-definite programming approach for robust tracking”

Data Mining

Best Student Paper Award

Kamran Paynabar, Sam Davanloo Tajbakhsh, Fulton Wang, Murat Yildirim and Mingdi You (l-r).

Recipient:
Mingdi You, University of Michigan
Recognized work:
“When Wind Meets Turbines: A New Statistical Approach for Characterizing the Heterogeneous Wake Effects in Multi-turbine Wind Farms”
Finalists:
Sam Davanloo Tajbakhsh, “Sparse Precision Matrix Selection for Fitting Gaussian Random Field Models to Large Data Sets”; Fulton Wang, MIT, “Falling Rule Lists”; Murat Yildirim, Georgia Tech, “Sensor-Driven Condition-Based Generation Maintenance and Operations Scheduling”

Prize for Young Researchers

Fatma Kılınç-Karzan (left) receives Prize for Young Researchers

Winner:
Fatma Kılınç-Karzan
Recognized work:
“On Minimal Valid Inequalities for Mixed Integer Conic Programs”

Javad Lavaei (right) receives Prize for Young Researchers.

Decision Analysis

Frank P. Ramsey Medal

J. Eric Bickel and L. Robin Keller (l-r).

Recipient:
L. Robin Keller, University of California, Irvine 
Recognition:
Distinguished contributions in decision analysis

Somayeh Sojoudi (right) receives Prize for Young Researchers.

Winner:
Javad Lavaei and Somayeh Sojoudi
Recognized work:
“Exactness of Semidefinite Relaxations for Nonlinear Optimization Problems with Underlying Graph Structure”

Practice Award

Frank Koch and Michael C. Runge (l-r).

Recipient:
Michael C. Runge, Kirk E. Lagory and Kendra Russell
Recognized work:
“Using Multi-criteria Decision Analysis to Explore Management Options in the Grand Canyon”

Khachiyan Prize

Jean Bernard Lasserre (right) receives the Khachiyan Prize.

Recipient:
Jean Bernard Lasserre
Recognized for:
Lifetime achievements in the field of optimization

Student Paper Award

Robert Hammond, Asa Palley and Canan Ulu (l-r).

Recipient:
Asa Palley, Duke University
Recognized work:
“Eliciting and Aggregating Forecasts when Information is Shared”
Finalists:
Mehmet Eren Ahsen, “Information aggregation and classification under anchoring bias: an application to judgments based on breast imaging”; and Shweta Agarwal, London School of Economics and Politics, “Probability revision rules to model the effect of interventions on uncertainties”

Farkas Prize of the Optimization Society

Robert Weismantel (left) receives the Farkas Prize.

Publication Award

James S. Dyer and James E. Smith (l-r).

Recipients:
David Brown and James Smith 
Recognized work:
“Optimal Sequential Exploration: Bandits, Clairvoyants and Wildcats”
Finalists:
Kenneth Lichtendahl, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Phillip Pfeifer, “The Wisdom of Competitive Crowds”; and Jeffrey Stonebraker, “Product-Generation Transition Decision Making for Bayer’s Hemophilia Drugs: Global Capacity Expansion Under Uncertainty with Supply-Demand Imbalances”

Organization Science

Best Dissertation Proposal Competition

Recipient:
Julia DiBenigno, MIT
Recognized work:
“Understanding organizational change in response to institutional pressure: The case of army mental healthcare for active-duty soldiers”
Finalists:
Pooria Assadi, Simon Fraser University,
 “Empirical Investigation of the Causes and Effects of Misconduct in the U.S. Securities Industry”; Feng Bai, University of British Columbia, “Beyond dominance and competence: A moral virtue theory of status attainment”; Santiago Campero, MIT, “Does firm status confer a recruiting advantage? Evidence from high tech entrepreneurial firms”; Jillian Chown, Toronto, Rotman School of Management, “Implementing organizational change within a professional workforce: A multi-method exploration”; Tiffany Johnson, Penn State, “Scaling cliffs and chasms: Examining micro-processes of inclusion through the lens of autism job coaches”;  Derek Harmon, University of Southern California, “The structure of strategic communication: Theory, measurement and effects”; Amer Madi, INSEAD, “Finding existential meaning at work: When and why do people seek existential meaning at work and how is it maintained, changed, or lost?”; Francois Neville, Georgia State, “Taking center stage: An examination of the role of executives during organizational interactions with secondary stakeholder activists”

Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment

Student Paper Travel Award

Sauleh Siddiqui and Safak Yucel (l-r).

Recipient:
Safak Yucel
Recognized work:
“Impact of Electricity Pricing Policy on Renewable Energy Investments and Carbon Emissions”

Public Sector O.R.

Best Paper Competition

Dionne Aleman, Shivam Gupta and Alex Mills (l-r).

First place:
Shivam Gupta, Milind Dawande, Ganesh Janakiraman and Ashutosh Sarkar
Recognized work:
“Distressed Selling by Farmers: Model, Analysis, and Use in Policy-Making”
Second place:
Eike Nohdurft, Elisa Long and Stefan Spinler, “Efficient spatial allocation of epidemic crisis intervention resources with a focus on Ebola in West Africa”
Honorable mention:
Na Li, Nan Kong, Quanlin Li and Zhibin Jiang, “Operational Performance Evaluation of Reverse Referral Partnership in the Chinese Healthcare System”

Best Publication Award in Energy

Ben Hobbs, Anthony Papavasiliou and Shmuel Oren (l-r).

Recipients:
Anthony Papavasiliou and Shmuel S. Oren
Recognized work:
“Multi-Area Stochastic Unit Commitment for High Wind Penetration in a Transmission Constrained Network”

Quality, Statistics & Reliability

Best Student Paper

Tirthankar Dasgupta, Yanjun Qian and Eunshin Byon (l-r).

Recipient:
Yanjun Qian
Recognized work:
“Multi-stage Nanocrystal Growth Identifying and Modeling via In-situ TEM Video”
Finalists:
Kaveh Bastani, “An Online Sparse Estimation-based Classification (OSEC) Approach for Real-time Monitoring in Additive Manufacturing”; Yan Jin, “Diagnostic Monitoring of Multivariate Process via a LASSO-BN Formulation”; Junbo Son, “RUL Prediction Based on Noisy Condition Monitoring Signals using Constrained Kalman Filter”

Best Publication Award in Environment & Sustainability

Victoria Chen and Esra Büyüktahtakın (l-r).

Recipients:
Halil Ibrahim Cobuloglu and Esra Büyüktahtakın (l-r).
Recognized work:
“A mixed-integer optimization model for the economic and environmental analysis of biomass production”

Best Refereed Paper Award

Hao Yan (left) accepts the Best Refereed Paper Award.

Best Publication Award in Natural Resources

Sándor Tóth and Andres Weintraub (l-r).

Recipients:
Rodolfo Carvajal, Miguel Constantino, Marcos Goycoolea, Juan Pablo Vielma and Andres Weintraub
Recognized work:
“Imposing Connectivity Constraints in Forest Planning Models”

Best Student Poster Competition

Abdallah Chehade (center) won the Best Student Poster Competition.

ENRE Young Researcher

Steffen Rebennack and Enzo Santis (l-r).

Recipient:
Steffen Rebennack
Recognized work:
“Combining sampling-based and scenario-based nested Benders decomposition methods: application to stochastic dual dynamic programming”

Railroad Applications

Problem Solving Competition

Negin Alemazkoor (left) helped win the Problem Solving Competition.

First place:
Negin Alemazkoor, Conrad Ruppert and Hadi Meidani
Second place:
Ivan Cardenas Gallo, Carlos Sarmiento Cardona and Gilberto Morales Zamora
Third place:
Sudhir Kumar Sinha, Sumit Raut and Harshad Khadilkar

Financial Services

Best Student Research Paper

Presentation of the Best Student Research Paper.

Winner:
Chi Seng Pun
Second place:
Deung-geon Ahn
Honorable mention:
Richard Neuberg

Railway Applications Distinguished Member Award

Clark Cheng (left) receives the Distinguished Member Award.

Health Applications

Pierskalla Best Paper Award

Haeng Cho (l-r).

Recipients:
Baris Ata, Anton Skaro and Sridhar Tayur
Recognized work:
“OrganJet: Overcoming geographical disparities in access to deceased donor kidneys in the United States”
Runners-up:
Stephen E Chick, Martin Forster and Paolo Pertile, “A Bayesian Decision-Theoretic Model of Sequential Experimentation with Delayed Responses”
Finalists:
Dan Yamin, Yoku Ibuka, Alison P. Galvani and Jeffery P. Townsend, “Optimal dosing of rotavirus vaccination in Japan”; Hadi El-Amine, Ebru K. Bish and Douglas R. Bish, “Robust Post-donation Blood Screening under Prevalence Rate Uncertainty”; Justin Jia and Hui Zhao, “Mitigating The U.S. Drug Shortages: Pareto-Improving Contract Design”

Railway ApplicationsStudent Paper Award

Nikola Besinovic (left) receives Student Paper Award.

Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services

Mark von Oyen and Hadi El-Amine (l-r).

Recipient:
Hadi El-Amine, Virginia Tech

Revenue Management and Pricing

Section Award

Vivek F. Farias, Srikanth Jagabathula, Bill Cooper and Devavrat Shah (l-r).

Recipients:
Vivek F. Farias, Srikanth Jagabathula and Devavrat Shah
Recognized work:
“A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Choice with Limited Data.”

Information Systems Society

Distinguished Fellow Award

Recipients:
Anitesh Barua, Ram D. Gopal, Anindya Ghose and Vishwanath Venkatesh

Management Science Best Paper in Information Systems

Recipients:
Mingfen Lin, Nagpurnanand R. Prabhala and Siva Viswanathan
Recognized work:
“Judging Borrowers by the Company They Keep: Friendship Networks and Information Asymmetry in Online Peer-to-Peer Lending”
Finalists:
Prasanna Tambe and Lorin M. Hitt, “Job Hopping, Information Technology Spillovers, and Productivity Growth”; Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu, “Responses to Entry in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspaper”

Service Science

Best Article Award

Recipients:
Chris K. Anderson and Benjamin Lawrence
Recognized work:
“The Influence of Online Reputation and Product Heterogeneity on Service Firm Financial Performance”
Honorable mention:
Euthemia Stavrulaki and Mark M. Davis, “A Typology for Service Supply Chains and Its Implications for Strategic Decisions”

Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award

Winner:
Jason Chan
Recognized work:
“Social and Health Impacts of the Internet”
Winner:
Lei Wang
Recognized work:
“Three Essays on the Interface of Location-Based Services, Consumers’ Shopping Behavior and Firms’ Marketing Strategy”
Runner-up:
Marios Kokkodis
“Online Labor Markets: Reputation Transferability, Career Development Paths and Hiring Decisions”

ISS Early Career Award

Recipients:
Param Vir Singh, Gal Oestreicher-Singer and Eric Overby

Simulation

Lifetime Professional Achievement

Douglas Morrice and Bernard Zeigler (l-r).

Recipient:
Bernard P. Zeigler
Recognition:
Career contributions to the field of simulation

INFORMS

Judith Liebman Award

Ed Kaplan, Kayse Maass and Dave Hunt (l-r).

Judith Liebman winner Eghbal Rashidi.

Recipients:
Kayse Maass, University of Michigan Student Chapter; Michael Prokle, University of Massachusetts Student Chapter; Eghbal Rashidi, Mississippi State University Student Chapter
Recognition:
Outstanding student volunteers who have been “moving spirits” in their universities, their student chapters and the Institute.

Distinguished Service Award

Enver Yücesan and Peter J. Haas (l-r).

Recipient:
Enver Yücesan
Recognition:
Long-standing, exceptional service to the simulation community

Outstanding Simulation Publication Award

Russell Barton, Jeremy Staum, Barry Nelson and Wei Xie (l-r).

Recipients:
Russell R. Barton, Barry L. Nelson and Wei Xie
Recognized works:
“Quantifying Input Uncertainty via Simulation Confidence Intervals” (INFORMS Journal on Computing) and “A Bayesian Framework for Quantifying Uncertainty in Stochastic Simulation” (Operations Research)

Student Chapter Annual Awards

University of Massachusetts Student Chapter.

University of Toronto Student Chapter.

Recipients:
(Summa Cum Laude): University of Massachusetts and University of Toronto; (Magna Cum Laude): Lehigh University, Northwestern University, Purdue University, Stanford University and University of South Florida; (Cum Laude): Arizona State University, Mississippi State University and North Carolina State University-Raleigh.
Recognition:
Outstanding participation and performance during the year of 2014

Social Media

Best Student Paper Competition

Recipient:
Nathan Kallus, MIT
Recognized work:
“Predicting Crowd Behavior with Big Public Data”
Runners-up:
Jing Peng, University of Pennsylvania, “Participation vs. Effectiveness of Paid Endorsers in Social Advertising Campaigns: A Field Experiment”; Vilma Todri, New York University, “Social Media Analytics: The Effectiveness of Marketing Strategies in Online Social Media”; and Zhenhuan Sui and David Milam, Ohio State University, “A Visual Monitoring Technique Based on Importance Score and Twitter Feeds”

Technology, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship

Distinguished Speaker Award

Recipient:
Steven Eppinger, MIT Sloan School of Management

INFORM-ED

Case Competition Award

First place:
Vera Tilson and Greg Dobson, University of Rochester
Recognized work:
“Medication Waste Reduction in an in-hospital Pharmacy: A Case That Bridges Problem Solving between a Traditional Case and an Industry Project”
Second place:
Kathleen Iacocca, University of Scranton, “Distribution Strategies at Yaka Pharmaceuticals”
Third place: Wendy Swenson Roth, Georgia State University, “Using Optimization for Team Information”

Best Dissertation Award

Recipient:
Alessio Cozzolino, Bocconi University
Recognized work:
“Three Essays on Technological Changes and Competitive Advantage: Evidence from the Newspaper Industry”
Runner-up:
Russell James Funk, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, “Essays on Collaboration, Innovation and Network Change in Organizations”
Finalists:
Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Harvard, “Shifting Loci of Innovation: A Study of Knowledge Boundaries, Identity and Innovation at NASA”; Catherine Magelssen, Rutgers, “Property Rights Theory and Ownership of Firm-Specific Advantages: The Implications of Contracting and Licensing within the Multinational Firm”

Junior Faculty Interest Group

JFIG Paper Competition Award

First place:
Juan Pablo Vielma, MIT
Recognized work:
“Embedded Formulations and Complexity for Unions of Polyhedra”
Second place:
David Goldberg, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Linwei Xin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Asymptotic Optimality of Tailored Base-Surge Policies in Dual Sourcing Inventory Systems”
Third place:
Shuangchi He, National University of Singapore, “Diffusion Approximation for Efficiency-Driven Queues: A Space-Time Scaling Approach”
Honorable mention:
Soroush Saghafian, Harvard University,
“Ambiguous Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes: Structural Results and Applications”; Rouba Ibrahim, University College London, “Capacity Sizing in Queueing Models with a Random Number of Servers”; Erick Moreno-Centeno, “Roundoff-Error-Free Algorithms for Solving Linear Systems via Cholesky and LU Factorizations”

Best Paper Award

Recipients:
Daniel W. Elfenbein, Barton H. Hamilton and Todd R. Zenger
Recognized work:
“The Small Firm Effect and the Entrepreneurial Spawning of Scientists and Engineers”
Runner-up:
Jasjit Singh and Lee Fleming, “Lone Inventors as Sources of Breakthroughs: Myth or Reality?”

Transportation Science & Logistics

Best Paper Award

TSL’s Best Paper Award presentation.

Recipient:
Belgacem Bouzaiene-Ayari, Clark Cheng, Sourav Das, Ricardo Fiorillo and Warren B. Powell
Recognized work:
“From Single Commodity to Multiattribute Models for Locomotive Optimization: A Comparison of Optimal Integer Programming and Approximate Dynamic Programming”

Location Analysis

Chuck ReVelle Rising Star Award

Ivan Conteras and Tim Lowe (l-r).

Recipients:  
Ivan Contreras, Concordia University

Dissertation Prize

Alexandre Jacquillat (center) receives Dissertation Prize.

MSOM

Student Paper Competition

Ashish Kabra, Daniela Saban, Tugce Martagan, Hummy Song, Safak Yucel and Fei Gao (l-r).

First place:
Ashish Kabra, INSEAD
Recognized work:
“Bike-Share Systems: Accessibility and Availability”
Second place:
Daniela Saban, Stanford University, “Procurement Mechanisms for Differentiated Products”
Finalists:
Fei Gao, University of Pennsylvania, “Online and Offline Information for Omnichannel Retailing”; Hummy Song, Harvard University, “Learning From the Best: The Effects of Public Relative Performance Feedback on Variability and Productivity”; Safak Yücel, Duke University, “Impact of Electricity Pricing Policy on Renewable Energy Investments and Carbon Emissions”; and Tugce Martagan, Eindhoven University of Technology, “Optimal Purification Decisions for Engineer-to-Order Proteins”

Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award

Michel Gendreau (center) receives Dissertation Prize.

Distinguished Service Award

Steve Gilbert and Brian Tomlin (l-r).

Recipient:
Steve Gilbert, University of Texas at Austin

Women in OR/MS

Advancement of Women in OR/MS

Aleda Roth and Margaret Brandeau (l-r).

Recipient:
Margaret Brandeau, Stanford University

Distinguished Fellows Award

Marty Lariviere and Brian Tomlin (l-r).

Recipients:
Martin Lariviere and Christopher Tang

Management Science Best Paper Award in Operations Management

Vishal Agrawal, Beril Toktay, Brian Tomlin and Mark Ferguson (l-r).

Recipients:
Vishal Agrawal, Mark Ferguson, Beril Toktay and Valerie Thomas
Recognized work:
“Is Leasing Greener than Selling?” Management Science, Vol. 58, No. 3, March 2012, pp. 523-533.