Virtually the best

Editor’s Note: For more information, and to watch finalist presentations and winner acceptance speeches, visit the Awards Hall at https://cattendee.abstractsonline.com/meeting/9022/awards-hall. Presentations are available to Annual Meeting registrants.

INFORMS President’s Award

INFORMS 2020 President Pinar Keskinocak presented this year’s President’s Award to Cynthia Barnhart in recognition of her multifaceted and multidisciplinary, high-impact activities in research, practice, education, leadership and service. Professor Barnhart has had a distinguished career, serving as the chancellor of MIT since 2014.

Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of large-scale optimization, airlines operations, the global airline industry, and transportation operations, planning and control. Barnhart has supervised a large group of students across a range of disciplines. She has a stellar publication record, and also had tremendous impact in practice, ranging from integrated airline scheduling to improving urban mobility.

Barnhart is an INFORMS Fellow, INFORMS past president, Edelman Laureate, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. She spearheaded the establishment of the Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Paper Competition, which helped increase awareness and participation in research and activities focused on societal impact among the INFORMS community. She is also committed to mentoring and inspiring others in the INFORMS community. Despite her incredibly busy schedule, she has been generous with her time in supporting others and setting an excellent example of leadership, integrity, respect and caring for others.

Barnhart received the INFORMS award for the Advancement of Women in Operations Research and Management Science, which also recognizes her commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion.

“I’m honored and deeply grateful to receive the INFORMS President’s Award,” Barnhart said. “I think that as operations researchers we sometimes forget or just don’t realize how powerful, and yes, magical, our field is.” 

George E. Kimball Medal

Grace Lin and Sheldon Jacobson received the Kimball Medal, which recognizes distinguished service to INFORMS and the profession of operations research and the management sciences. Jeff Camm served as the 2020 committee chair.

Grace Lin is vice president and director of the Big Data Research Center, and chair professor in the Department of Business Administration at Asia University in Taichung, Taiwan. Dr. Lin recently founded the United Financial Intelligence Corp. (UFI) to support digital transformation and care quality improvement of aging care organizations. From 2011 to 2016, Lin was the founder and VP of the Data Analytics Technology and Applications (DATA) Institute and VP for the Advanced Research Institute (ARI) at the Institute for Information Industry (III). At III, she initiated key industry-government R&D programs including Smart Living and Smart Commerce Strategy Plan, Big Data Analytics, Smart Healthcare, Smart Tourism, FinTech and Smart Agriculture. Previously, Lin worked for IBM US for more than 16 years as the Global Sense-and-Respond Value-Net Leader and CTO and director for Innovation and Emerging Solutions at IBM Global Business Services, and as a research staff member, manager and senior manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Lin’s service to INFORMS and the profession has been substantial. She has been twice elected INFORMS VP Practice and VP International Activities, and she has chaired the INFORMS Fellow Selection Committee and several INFORMS and IEEE conferences. Additionally, she has been active in the Edelman Award Competition, having served multiple years as judge and as a member of the selection committee.

Active in WORMS, she has been a strong supporter of women in O.R. Passionate about bridging the gap between academia and industry, she has served on a number of university advisory boards. She has also served on several INFORMS editorial boards and is a frequent keynote speaker at global conferences and industry events.
Lin’s awards include the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award, IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, IBM Corporate Logistics Award, IBM Research Division Award, IIE Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Purdue Outstanding Industrial Engineer Award, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsin-Ju, Taiwan.

Sheldon H. Jacobson is founder professor in computer science, director of the Simulation and Optimization Laboratory, and founding director of the Bed Time Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds appointments in Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mathematics and the College of Medicine.

Professor Jacobson has made several seminal research contributions, all focusing on applying operations research (O.R.) and advanced analytics to address societal problems of national interest. For example, his research on multilevel aviation security passenger screening at airports was the precursor to risk-based security, providing the foundational concepts that informed the design and implementation of TSA PreCheck. His contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2018 INFORMS Impact Prize, given biennially to recognize widespread impact of operations research.

Professor Jacobson’s service to INFORMS and the profession spans many dimensions. His notable contributions include serving as INFORMS Treasurer, program director for operations research at the National Science Foundation, serving on National Academy of Science and National Academy of Medicine committees, general chair for the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, authoring numerous articles for OR/MS Today and recording podcasts for INFORMS, briefing policymakers about the value of his research on issues of national concern, and working with the media in communicating his research findings to the general public as an expert. 

Frederick W. Lanchester Prize

The 2020 Lanchester Prize for the best contribution to operations research and management science published in English, was awarded to Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani of Delft University of Technology and Daniel Kuhn of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne for their paper series, “Data-driven distributionally robust optimization using the Wasserstein metric: Performance guarantees and tractable reformulations.”

The series of papers address a fundamental challenge in optimization under uncertainty: that the distribution of the uncertain problem parameters, which is needed to compute the expected value of the objective function, is unknown. In practice, one has access to a set of training samples from this distribution. In this case, a natural goal is to find a procedure that transforms the training data to a hopefully near-optimal decision and a prediction of its expected cost.

The papers construct a data-driven approach to decisions by solving a distributionally robust optimization problem over a Wasserstein ball. These contributions are not only foundational but they have also paved the way for a new perspective on popular methods in statistics and machine learning. 

John von Neumann Theory Prize

The 2020 John von Neumann Theory Prize was awarded to Adrian Lewis of Cornell University for his fundamental and sustained contributions to continuous optimization, operations research and, more broadly, computational science. His work has pushed the frontiers of nonlinear optimization and convex analysis and developed path-breaking theory that has led to much subsequent work. Through scholarly papers, research monographs and mentorship, he has influenced several generations of optimization researchers, as well as practitioners.

Professor Lewis has published seminal work on a wide range of topics including eigenvalue optimization, quasi-Newton algorithms, gradient sampling methods and control, activity identification via partial smoothness and more. His results on convex analysis over Hermitian matrices opened the door to the subdifferential analysis of such functions, as well as to a duality and sensitivity theory for optimization problems with such functions. According to the citation: Together with Burke and Overton, he produced a series of papers leading to a deep understanding of the variational behavior of spectral functions, including the spectral radius. His convergence guarantees for alternating/cyclic projection methods, both for convex and nonconvex settings, are used to find a point at the intersection of finitely many sets, a prototypical problem in computational mathematics.

A consistent theme in Lewis’ work is to bring variational analytic tools and computation closer together. For example, a recent joint work proves that under a natural transversality condition, described in variational analytic terms, the method of alternating projections converges linearly locally. His more recent work has focused on understanding the impact of variational analytic notions of stability on linear/quadratic rates of convergence of Gauss-Newton type methods for minimizing compositions of convex functions and smooth maps. These results have implications for a number of fundamental problems including phase retrieval, matrix factorization and robust principal component analysis.

Impact Prize

David Simchi-Levi of MIT was awarded the 2020 Impact Prize for his leading role in developing and disseminating a new highly impactful paradigm for the identification and mitigation of risks in supply chains.

Over the past decade, Professor Simchi-Levi has spearheaded the development and continual refinement of a new approach to supply chain risk management that is especially suited to handling disruptions associated with unforeseen, low-probability, high-impact events. The methodology, referred to as the Risk Exposure Index (REI), quantitatively analyzes supply chain resiliency, identifies hidden risks and suggests mitigation strategies to address these risks. Through his publications, lectures, webinars and interviews, Simchi-Levi has ensured that the ideas, concepts and innovations of REI, which are grounded in operations research, are accessible to a wide audience in academia, industry and government. This transformative methodology has been adopted by a wide range of organizations.

Generously supported by Princeton Consultants, the Impact Prize is awarded once every two years to recognize widespread impact in the practice of operations research.

Daniel H. Wagner Prize

A multi-university research team won the 2020 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research for their work to increase efficiency in product planning and supply in agribusiness. The work generates long-term solutions to the challenges of planning and supplying seed corn to meet farmer and consumer demand. The prize-winning team included Saurabh Bansal of Pennsylvania State University, Genaro J. Gutierrez of the University of Texas at Austin and Mahesh Nagarajan of the University of British Columbia. 

The prize-winning paper, “Distribution Estimation and Efficient Optimization for Portfolio Management in Agribusiness: Analytical Developments and Benefits,” provides unique applications of analytics and O.R. to improve the distribution and performance of crops to achieve monetary and nonmonetary benefits. The researchers looked at the commercial seed corn business to apply their solutions.

Other finalists included:

• “Scheduling the Main Professional Soccer League of Argentina,” Mario Guajardo, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Norway; Facundo Gutiérrez and Guillermo Duran, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Javier Marenco, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina; and Denis R. Saure and Gonzalo Zamorano, University of Chile
• “Driver Positioning and Incentive Budgeting with an Escrow Mechanism for Ridesharing Platforms,” Hao Yi Ong and Davide Crapis, Lyft, and Daniel Freund, MIT
• “A Boost for Urban Sustainability: Optimizing Electric Transit Bus Networks in Rotterdam,” Ayman Abdelwahed, Pieter van den Berg, Tobias Brandt and Wolfgang Ketter, Erasmus Rotterdam University, Netherlands; and Judith Mulder, Erasmus School of Economics, Netherlands
• “Formulation Matters: Reciprocating Integer Programming for Birchbox Product Assortment,” Irvin J. Lustig, CAP, Patricia Randall and Robert Randall, Princeton Consultants
  

Volunteer Service Awards

Recipients of this year’s Volunteer Service Awards include: Dayana Cope, Warren Hearnes, Sheldon Jacobson, Col. William Klimack, Jack Levis, Shantih Spanton and Julie Swann. First awarded in 2016, the awards are given to INFORMS members to recognize exceptional volunteer service to the Institute.

Saul Gass Expository Writing Award

Sheldon Jacobson of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign received the 2020 Saul Gass Expository Writing Award, which recognizes an author whose publications set an exemplary standard of exposition. The writing should possess an influence and accessibility enhanced by expository excellence.

Professor Jacobson has been a prolific writer and communicator of operations research for more than 30 years. His 300+ articles include not only academic journal papers but also opinion pieces in newspapers and other public media. His research and expositions have made significant impact on aviation security policies. Several of his peer-reviewed published papers provided the theoretical underpinnings that informed the design of TSA PreCheck, the risk-based airport-security expediting system deployed by the Transportation Security Administration at airports across the United States.

Over the decades, Jacobson has dedicated his effort to draw the attention of the general public to the power of operations research and analytics for informed policy and decision making. He has written on a broad range of subjects: aviation security, healthcare, transportation, political redistricting and elections, etc. Jacobson’s writings have reached such a wide audience due to his expository talent for explaining intricate scientific theories in an intuitive way so that the policy implications become clear. As his nominators note: “Sheldon’s gift for making complex technical concepts and analysis accessible to the general public is the hallmark of his writings and communications.”

Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice

Susan Martonosi of Harvey Mudd College won the 2020 Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, which is awarded annually to a teacher for excellence in teaching the practice of OR/MS. The purpose of this award is to recognize a teacher who has succeeded in helping their students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be effective practitioners of operations research or management science.

The citation read in part: “While course variety, course material and classroom presence are important, the ultimate marker of teaching excellence is whether students can actually use in practice what teachers teach them. Dr. Martonosi’s accomplishments exceed all these criteria – her teaching and mentoring has substantially enhanced her students’ confidence and competence.”

INFORMS Case Competition

Dessislava Pachamanova (Babson College), Vera Tilson (University of Rochester) and Keely Dwyer-Matzky (University of Rochester Medical Center and Golisano Children's Hospital) won the 2020 INFORMS Case Competition for the project “Machine Learning, Ethics and Change Management: A Data-Driven Approach to Improving Hospital Observation Unit Operations.”

Second place was awarded to Timothy C. Y. Chan and Daniel Frances (both of University of Toronto), Derya Demirtas (University of Twente) and Daria Terekhov (Concordia University) for their project “Maximizing Team Diversity in the Praxis Course at the University of Toronto.” Will Ma of Columbia University was a finalist.

The INFORMS Case Competition encourages the creation, dissemination and classroom use of new, unpublished cases in operations research, management science and analytics. The prize is awarded annually to recognize outstanding cases. The submissions are judged according to the relevance of application of one or more of INFORMS constituent disciplines and on the quality of the presentation given during the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award

Nikhil Garg of Stanford University won the 2020 George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “Designing Marketplaces and Civic Engagement Platforms: Learning, Incentives and Pricing.” Honorable mentions went to Gal Mendelson of Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and Jean Pauphilet of MIT. Thodoris Lykouris of Cornell University and Min-hwan Oh of Columbia University were finalists. Named after a legendary OR/MS figure and the “Father of Linear Programming,” the award is given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. 

Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition

Emma Gibson of MIT won the 2020 Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition for her project, “Sample Transport Optimization.” Daniel Duque of Northwestern University and Remi Pasco of the University of Texas at Austin finished second, for their project, “COVID-19: How to Relax Social Distancing If You Must.” Honorable mentions went to Jean Pauphilet, MIT, and Ali Cem Randa, University of California, San Francisco.

The competition identifies and honors outstanding student projects that have, or are likely to have, a significant societal impact on individuals, communities and organizations that go beyond that of private and for-profit initiatives. To be considered for this award, the use of O.R. methods and tools must be central to the success of the project. Additionally, the papers are assessed by their innovative contributions to theory, computational methods and the strategies used to ensure their implementation.

Finalists for the Doing Good with Good O.R. competition presented their work in a special session during the Virtual 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting.

George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition

Ryan Cory-Wright and Jean Pauphilet of MIT won the 2020 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition for the paper, “Mixed-Projection Conic Optimization: A New Paradigm for Modeling Rank Constraints.” Omar El Housni of Columbia University placed second, while Yi-Chun Chen of UCLA, Ahmadreza Momeni of Stanford University and Yunzong Xu of MIT all received honorable mentions.

This year the committee had to select a winner from a record number of 119 submissions.

The George Nicholson student award was established in memory of George E. Nicholson, Jr. Though Professor Nicholson was an academician, his interests ranged far beyond research, and he was deeply involved with the concerns of students. The competition is held each year to identify and honor outstanding student papers in the fields of operations research and the management sciences. The criteria used by the award committee include originality, technical depth and correctness, novelty, breadth and expected impact and exposition. 

Undergraduate Operations Research Prize

The 2020 Undergraduate Operations Research Prize was presented to Wes Gurnee of Cornell University for his work, “Fairmandering: A Column Generation Heuristic for Fairness-Optimized Political Redistricting.” Honorable mention went to Nicholas André G. Johnson of Princeton University, as well as Daniel Yamin of Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.

Finalists were selected after two rounds of judging. They then presented their work in two sessions during the Virtual 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle. The prize committee received 40 high-quality entries from 11 countries. 

Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award

Philip Ernst of Rice University was named the first recipient of the Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award for Excellence in Operations Research. This award was established by a generous endowment from the Donald P. Gaver Family and its purpose is to support creative and diverse work in operations research in the early career of the recipient. The candidate must be within 10 years of receiving a Ph.D. and be in a tenure-track academic appointment.

The award was presented during the Virtual 2020 Annual Meeting and includes an engraved citation plaque, a cash award and a potential professional development funding supplement. This award honors the legacy of longtime member and fellow of INFORMS, Donald P. Gaver, Jr., who served as chairman of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society in 1989 and was highly respected among his peers as well as a mentor to students.

2020 Seth Bonder Scholarships

The 2020 Bonder Scholarship for Applied O.R. in Health Services was awarded to Arielle Elissa Anderer, while the 2020 Bonder Scholarship for Applied O.R. in Military and Security Applications was won by Joshua T. Margolis.

Anderer is a doctoral candidate in operations research at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her work, “Adaptive Clinical Trial Designs with Surrogates: When Should We Bother?” won the 2020 MSOM Student Paper Competition and 2019 Pierskalla Award for Best Paper in Healthcare from INFORMS.

Margolis is pursuing a Ph.D. in industrial engineering under the direction of Professor Scott Mason at Clemson University. Margolis’ research is in vehicle routing problems for homeland security applications, with a focus on target surveillance.

Seth Bonder was a U.S. Air Force pilot, professor at the University of Michigan, founder and CEO of Vector Research and an extraordinary leader in the field of operations research. He served as the 27th president of ORSA, a vice president of IFORS, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Kimball Medal and the INFORMS President’s Award. Dr. Bonder established the scholarships to encourage O.R. approaches to the areas of military applications and health services. The scholarships aim to promote the development and use of process modeling and operations research analysis to military and healthcare applications.

Merrill Bonder, Seth’s widow and executive director of the Seth Bonder Foundation, continues to support these scholarships.