INFORMS Welcomes Back In-person celebration at 2022 Awards Ceremony

The following awards and prizes were presented at the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, the first fully in-person Annual Meeting since 2019.  

Editor’s note: The full Awards Ceremony can be viewed on the INFORMS YouTube channel [1]. Read more about the honorees at https://meetings.informs.org/wordpress/indianapolis2022/awards-hall/.  

INFORMS President’s Award 

INFORMS 2022 President Radhika Kulkarni presented this year’s President’s Award to Candace (Candi) Yano in recognition of her many research contributions, her impact on educating future O.R. professionals and for her extensive INFORMS service.   

Yano is a professor in the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on supply chain management and interdisciplinary problems involving operations management and marketing. She also gives back to the community via her work with nonprofit organizations.  

As the first female department chair in the College of Engineering and first Asian-American female associate dean for academic affairs at Haas, Yano is a role model for women, especially those straddling different cultures. She co-founded the INFORMS Forum for Women in OR/MS (WORMS) and is a recipient of the WORMS Award. Yano spearheaded the establishment of the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society and was recognized with the MSOM Distinguished Service Award for her efforts in MSOM’s formative years. Yano is a fellow of INFORMS and was awarded the George E. Kimball Medal in recognition of her distinguished service to INFORMS and the profession.  

Yano has served in many volunteer roles within INFORMS for more than three decades. 

In her acceptance speech, Yano said, “Most opportunities for professional service are due to other people opening doors. The list of individuals who have opened doors for me is too long to mention here, but let me say thank you to the many journal editors, INFORMS committee chairs and INFORMS board members and other leaders, who have done so much.” Regarding her involvement in the professional society, she concluded, “Certainly, I have received much, much more than I have given.”   

George E. Kimball Medal 

Michael Fu and Ranganath Nuggehalli, CAP, received the 2022 Kimball Medal, which recognizes distinguished service to INFORMS and the profession of operations research and the management sciences.  

Michael Fu is the Smith Chair of Management Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is an exemplary academic when it comes to professional service – a model for young academics to emulate. He has served in numerous distinct and significant roles both within INFORMS and across the broader operations research community. He has served on numerous journal editorial boards for INFORMS journals (including the Operations Research Simulation Area Editor and Management Science Stochastic Models and Simulation Department Editor). He has undertaken leadership roles for numerous INFORMS conferences, including serving as the general co-chair of the 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting, cluster chair for the 2018 INFORMS International Conference, and program chair for the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). He also served on the INFORMS Board of Directors from 2017-2018 as treasurer.   

Fu has provided tireless service to the broader INFORMS and international communities, including serving as the NSF Program Director for Operations Research. Michael’s altruistic character traits that permeate his personal life are the very same ones that have made him a valuable and dedicated contributor to INFORMS.  

In his acceptance speech, Fu addressed O.R. and analytics students, saying, “Service may sometimes seem thankless, but if you find activities that are right for you, not only will you experience occasional joy, but in the long run, the intangible benefits are priceless.”  

Ranganath Nuggehalli, CAP, is the principal scientist of UPS. He has provided high-impact service to the profession since joining ORSA more than 30 years ago. He stewarded the Franz Edelman Award winning project, UPS ORION, that has become a model for implementing O.R. methodologies, and is regarded as one of the most impactful O.R. projects in the world.  

During Nuggehalli’s tenure, UPS became the first company to win two INFORMS Prizes. To promote and support the practice of the operations research profession, he conceived the INFORMS UPS George D. Smith Prize and spearheaded its creation. Awarded to an academic program for effective and innovative preparation of practitioners, the prize is regarded as the highest honor in O.R. education globally. The unique competition provides needed benchmarks and has positively impacted O.R. education and the discipline itself.   

Nuggehalli served as president of the INFORMS Practice Section and an officer of the INFORMS Roundtable and Service Science Section. He was an inaugural recipient of the INFORMS Volunteer Service Award and a founding CAP. He is rewarded for his many contributions to the field of O.R. and his distinguished service to INFORMS.  

Nuggehalli said, “While this prize is for recognizing a member’s service to the profession and INFORMS, I feel that it is me who has benefitted more from the profession and INFORMS. Involvement with the INFORMS community has enriched my professional and personal life.”  

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 15, 2023 

Frederick W. Lanchester Prize 

The 2022 Lanchester Prize for the best contribution to operations research and management science published in English was awarded to Daniel Russo and Benjamin Van Roy, both from Stanford University, for their papers, “Learning to Optimize via Posterior Sampling, An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Thompson Sampling” and “Learning to Optimize via Information-Directed Sampling, A Tutorial on Thompson Sampling.” 

These papers have made fundamental contributions to the area of online statistical learning and optimization, providing a unifying view of a broad set of these problems. The work has changed the way the entire field conceptualizes foundational approaches to the acquisition and exploitation of information, and it has opened up new avenues for both theoretical and applied work. 

The 2022 Lanchester Prize was also awarded to Yurii Nesterov, CORE/UCL, for the book, “Lectures on Convex Optimization.” The book has arguably the most comprehensive treatment of algorithmic continuous optimization. By developing both foundational results and recent breakthroughs, its publication has advanced the state of the art in operations research and its extensions in science, engineering, computer science and machine learning. 

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 15, 2023  

John von Neumann Theory Prize  

The 2022 John von Neumann Theory Prize was awarded to Vijay Vazirani of the University of California, Irvine, for his fundamental and sustained contributions to the design of algorithms, including approximation algorithms, computational complexity theory and algorithmic game theory, central to operations research and the management sciences.  

While a first-year Ph.D. student, Vazirani developed what is still the most efficient algorithm for the classical maximum matching problem, with fellow student Silvio Micali. His co-authored seminal 1990 paper proposed an optimal algorithm for the online bipartite matching problem, in which the underlying graph is revealed one vertex at a time and needs to be instantaneously matched without knowledge of future arrivals. Numerous matching markets, including Google’s AdWords, Uber and Airbnb, share this online decision-making feature, and this algorithm has become a paradigm in this area. More recent joint work introduced a tradeoff-revealing family of linear programs and the notion of bid-scaling – ideas that have had enormous influence within digital advertising markets. 

In addition, Vazirani is known for his role in developing approximation algorithms for NP-hard optimization problems, including set covering, survivable network design, multicommodity flow and multicut, k-cuts, facility location, and k-medians, culminating in his now classic book, “Approximation Algorithms.” He has been a major contributor to the primal-dual approach that is now recognized as the most powerful algorithmic design technique within this area. 

Vazirani is one of the founders of algorithmic game theory, focusing on the computability of market equilibria. In a 2012 paper, he introduced the notion of a rational convex program, established that they “behave like” linear programs, and showed that certain market equilibria programs have this property. He and his co-authors also provided complementary pivot algorithms for markets under additively-separable, piecewise-linear concave utilities and markets with production, thereby yielding practical tractability for this class of problems. In other joint work, he gave the first polynomial-time algorithm for a market model, namely the Fisher market with linear utility functions. 

2023 NOMINATION DEADLINE: JUNE 1, 2023 

Impact Prize  

The 2022 Impact Prize was awarded to Yu Ding and Rui Tuo (Texas A&M University), Jianhua Huang (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Hoon Hwangbo (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Giwhyun Lee (Korea Army Academy at Yeong-Cheon) and Abhinav Prakash (Walmart Labs), for their use of increasing alternative sources of energy — wind power in particular — for protection of both the environment and economic prosperity of society. Lowering costs of wind turbines and increasing productivity in service is crucial for making wind energy competitive in the energy markets. Yet, evaluating the effectiveness of wind turbine design innovations has been difficult.   

These award winners have expanded efforts to develop novel data science approaches that address the challenge of devising accurate and effective quantification methods of wind turbine performance. Their approach boasts high accuracy while breaking the disciplinary barriers in turbine performance evaluation and comparison. In the method, the hybrid power curve model connects the multivariate wind and environmental inputs with the power output, while mitigating the scalability issues that often plague kernel-based function regression methods in real-life applications.   

Ding and his colleagues have ensured that new performance quantification ideas and methods, grounded in data analytics, are accessible to a broad audience in academia and the wind industry. 

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 

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Anheuser-Busch InBev won the 2022 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research for their work that leverages physical retail experiments and a platform named “TestOps” to increase sales and revenue. The prize-winning team included Tianyi Peng, Patricio Foncea, Luis Costa, Jingyuan (Donna) Gan and Vivek F. Farias, of MIT, and Ivo Rosa Montenegro, Ayush Garg, Dusan Popovic and Kumarjit Pathak, of Anheuser-Busch InBev. 

The prize-winning paper, “Generalized Synthetic Control for TestOps at ABI: Models, Algorithms, and Infrastructure,” provides profound applications of analytics and O.R. to understand experimental power relative to alternatives using physical retail experiments and the platform, “TestOps.” The platform finds that when treatment effects are small, the environment is noisy and nonstationary, and adherence problems are common, which results in roughly 100x increase of experimental power relative to alternatives. This work sees a 1%-2% increase in sales and nearly $135 million in monthly revenue.  

Other finalists included: 

• “AI vs. Human Buyers: A Study of Alibaba’s Inventory Replenishment System,” Jiaxi Liu, Shuyi Lin, Yidong Zhang, Alibaba Group; Linwei Xin, University of Chicago Booth School of Business 
• “Human-Centric Parcel Delivery at Deutsche Post with Operations Research and Machine Learning,” Uğur Arıkan, Thorsten Kranz, Baris Cem Sal, Severin Schmitt, Jonas Witt, Deutsche Post DHL Group 
• “Reshaping National Organ Allocation Policy,” Theodore Papalexopoulos, Dimitris Bertsimas, Nikolaos Trichakis, MIT Operations Research Center; James Alcorn, Rebecca Goff, Darren Stewart, United Network for Organ Sharing 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 15, 2023 

Volunteer Service Awards 

Recipients of this year’s Volunteer Service Awards include: Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia; Anahita Khojandi, University of Pittsburgh; Abdullah Konak, Pennsylvania State University; Tarun Mohan Lal, Atrium Health; Daniel Reich, Naval Postgraduate School; and Jay Simon, American University. 

First awarded in 2016, the awards are given to INFORMS members to recognize exceptional volunteer service to the Institute. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 30, 2023 

Amazon SCOT and INFORMS Scholarship 

New in 2021, the Amazon SCOT and INFORMS Scholarships provided the opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to attend the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting. This scholarship program, sponsored by Amazon SCOT, aims to foster the professional pipeline of operations research, management science and analytics researchers by providing undergraduate juniors and seniors as well as graduate students from underrepresented groups an opportunity to experience these exciting fields and gain professional development opportunities by attending the INFORMS Annual Meeting. Scholarships covered conference registration fees, hotel accommodations and reimbursement for reasonable transportation expenses. 

Recipients of the 2022 Amazon SCOT and INFORMS Scholarships included: 

• Julia Bitencourt, Auburn University 
• Oriana Calderon, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 
• Brenda Cobena, Cirrelt 
• Laya Dudi, University of Illinois Chicago
• Vitor Farias Costa de Carvalho, Purdue University 
• Esneyder Gonzalez, University at Buffalo 
• Cristóbal Heredia, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez 
• Adrian Hernandez, Northwestern University 
• Juan Pablo Morande, North Carolina A&T State University 
• Anh Phuong Ngo, University of Central Florida 
• Ridwan Olabiyi, Arizona State University 
• Swati Padmanabhan, University of Washington  
• Miguel Peinado-Guerrero, Arizona State University 
• Natalie Randall, University of Iowa 
• Mary Lizbeth Rojas, Saint Louis University  

Saul Gass Expository Writing Award 

Warren Powell of Princeton University and Optimal Dynamics received the 2022 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. 

Powell is a prolific writer and communicator whose contributions have helped to significantly shape and advance methods of operations research, and whose writings have impacted practice and policy. Author of hundreds of scholarly articles and multiple books, his works have received well over 20,000 citations. His books on approximate dynamic programming have inspired researchers and shaped the minds of many in this field. His writings have helped build a path to optimal learning methods that have become a focus of whole communities of researchers and practitioners in recent years.   

Through his relentless efforts to show and explain how to overcome the “curse of dimensionality,” his work has had major impact on practice in areas ranging from freight transportation to the smart grid. His methodologies have informed research across engineering and computer science disciplines. Also noteworthy are his undying efforts to create a common language to unite works in disparate fields, a notion that no doubt recognizes that exposition is as important as math in advancing the field together.  
 
Powell notes, “I started in trucking but found that I could take what I learned into logistics and supply chains, energy systems, health and finance. I started doing optimal learning, which introduced me to materials science and e-commerce. The ability to move our mathematics across diverse problem domains is one of the great features of operations research.” 

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 30, 2023 

Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice 

Burcu Keskin of the University of Alabama and Junmin Shi of the New Jersey Institute of Technology were both awarded the 2022 Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, which is awarded annually to a teacher(s) for excellence in teaching the practice of OR/MS. The purpose of this award is to recognize a teacher(s) who has succeeded in helping their students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be effective practitioners of operations research or management science.  

The teaching of OR/MS practice is built on course variety, innovative materials, and classroom presence. However, truly achieving teaching excellence is demonstrated when students think critically and can use their knowledge to solve real-life operational challenges. 

Keskin’s citation read in part: “Dr. Keskin’s accomplishments exceed all these criteria. Her teaching approach – described by former students as ‘inspirational, empowering, and providing superior mentorship’ – has benefited a constant stream of successful practitioners.”  

Shi’s citation read: “Dr. Shi’s accomplishments exceed all these criteria. His teaching approach – described by former students as ‘hands-on and exceptionally engaging’ – has benefited a constant stream of successful practitioners.” 

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 30, 2023 

INFORMS Case Competition 

Timothy Chan, Craig Fernandes and Albert Loa, from the University of Toronto, along with Nathan Sandholtz from Brigham Young University, won the 2022 INFORMS Case Competition for the project “Moneyball for Murderball: Using Analytics to Construct Lineups in Wheelchair Rugby.”  

The INFORMS Case Competition encourages the creation, dissemination and classroom use of new, unpublished cases in operations research, management science and analytics. 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. 

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JULY 9, 2023  

George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award  

Su Jia of Carnegie Mellon University won the 2022 George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “Learning and Earning Under Noise and Uncertainty.” 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 OR/MS that is innovative and relevant to practice. 

Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition 

Bonn Kleiford Seranilla of the University of Luxembourg won the 2022 Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition for the project, “Optimizing Vaccine Distribution in Developing Countries under Natural Disaster Risk.” Aditya Mate of Harvard University placed second for his project, “Optimization & Planning of Limited Resources for Assisting Nonprofits in Improving Maternal Health.”  

This year, five finalists were invited to Indianapolis to present their work during the Annual Meeting. The competition 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.  

George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition 

Isaac Grosof and Ziv Scully of Carnegie Mellon University won the 2022 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition for the paper, “The Gittins Policy is Nearly Optimal in the M/G/k under Extremely General Conditions.” Second place was awarded to Lin Fan, Stanford University, for the paper, “On the Robustness of Second-Price Auctions in Prior-Independent Mechanism Design.” 

The George Nicholson student award was established in memory of George E. Nicholson, Jr. The competition is held each year to identify and honor outstanding student papers in 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. 

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 3, 2023 

Undergraduate Operations Research Prize  

The 2022 Undergraduate Operations Research Prize was presented to Matthew Brun of Rice University for his work, “On the Strength of Lagrangian Duality in Multiobjective Integer Programming.”   

The 2022 prize committee was chaired by Trilce Encarnacion, who accepted 17 high-quality entries from four countries. The entries either tackled challenging theory and methodology problems or solved impactful real-world problems with OR/MS techniques. 

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 30, 2023 

Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award 

Yao Xie of Georgie Tech was named the third 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.   

Xie was recognized for outstanding research contributions at the interface of operations research, statistics, machine learning and optimization; 
for successfully applying her research talent to applications of societal importance; and for contributions to the education and mentoring of students at all levels. 

This award honors the legacy of longtime member and INFORMS Fellow, Donald P. Gaver, Jr., who served as chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society in 1989 and was highly respected among his peers as well as a mentor to students. The award candidate must be within 10 years of receiving a Ph.D. and be in a tenure-track academic appointment. 

2023 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 25, 2023  

2022 Seth Bonder Scholarships 

The 2022 Bonder Scholarship for Applied O.R. in Health Services was awarded to Katherine Adams, while the 2022 Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military and Security Applications was given to Soumyadeep Hore. 

Adams is a Ph.D. candidate in industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is co-advised by assistant professors Justin Boutilier (a former Bonder Scholarship recipient) and Yonatan Mintz. Adams uses optimization techniques to inform healthcare interventions in low- and middle-income countries – work that’s motivated by growing up in her home country of Brazil. She is currently working on a project to create personalized diabetes screening and treatment plans that can be used by community health workers in urban slums. 

In her acceptance speech, Adams said, “Beyond a personal achievement, this award highlights the potential of O.R. applied to global health. Every year, millions of people die of preventable and treatable diseases. Many tools that we use to deal with the chronic disease epidemic are tailored to high-income countries.  

“But those tools cannot always be transferred and applied to low- and middle-income countries. Working on problems in these settings is important to eliminate health disparities. Thanks to the Bonder Scholarship, I’ll be able to continue working on problems that are not only relevant practically but are also exciting theoretically and can fuel innovative solutions.” 

Hore is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at the University of South Florida. Nathaniel Bastien, chair of the Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military and Security Applications, noted that Hore and his research best represents the successful application of process modeling and O.R. analyses to defense-related applications, including military and national security issues. Hore said, “I will continue my efforts to work on security-related problems and look forward to creating innovative solutions and a safer tomorrow for many years to come. I am humbled and appreciative.” 

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 O.R. analysis to military and healthcare applications.  

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

Reference 

1. https://youtu.be/C9ZIYfFb9gk