Faculty and students in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) were among those selected as winners for the various prizes and awards given at the 2012 INFORMS Annual Meeting, held October 14-17 in Phoenix, AZ.

John Bartholdi, Manhattan Associates Chair of Supply Chain Management, along with Don Eisenstein (MS IE 1983, PhD IE 1992), were awarded the 2012 TSL Best Paper Prize for their paper, "A self-coordinating bus route to avoid bus bunching."

Jim Dai, Edenfield Professor in ISyE, delivered the Markov Lecture, a prestigious honor bestowed by the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS.

Assistant Professor Ton Dieker won the prestigious Erlang Prize for his outstanding contributions to several areas, including the theory of stochastic processes, stochastic networks, and stochastic analysis of algorithms.

George Nemhauser, the A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professor in ISyE, along with his colleague Laurence Wolsey, professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, were named winners of the prestigious John von Neumann Theory prize.

Ph.D. student Rodolfo Carvajal won the Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment Best Paper Award in Environment and Sustainability Sponsored Sessions for his paper, “Imposing Connectivity Constraints in Forest Planning Models,” co-authored by  R. Carvajal, M. Constantino, M. Goycoolea (Ph.D. IE 2006), J.P. Vielma (Ph.D. IE 2009.), and A. Weintraub.

Ph.D. student Kaibo Liu, advised by Professor Jianjun Shi, won the 2012 INFORMS Data-mining Section Best Student Paper Competition for his paper "Health Index Development Based on Sensory Data Fusion for Degradation Modeling and Prognostic Analysis."

Ph.D. student Diego Morán won the 2012 INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize for his paper "A Strong Dual for Conic Mixed Integer Programs,” co-authored with his advisor, Assistant Professor Santanu S. Dey, and Juan Pablo Vielma, Ph.D. IE 2009.

Jon Petersen, Ph.D. IE 2012, advised by Professor Emeritus Ellis Johnson and John-Paul Clarke, associate professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering with a courtesy appointment in ISyE, won the 2012 Transportation Science and Logistics Society Dissertation Prize for his thesis “Large-Scale Mixed Integer Optimization Approaches for Scheduling Airline Operations Under Irregularity.”  Jessica Heier Stamm, Ph.D. IE 2010, won the prize in 2011 under the direction of Associate Professors Ozlem Ergun and Julie Swann, and Juan Morales, Ph.D. IE, won in 2007 under the guidance of Associate Professor Alan Erera and former Professor Martin Savelsbergh.

Ph.D. student Matthew Plumlee, advised by Associate Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil and Professor Jianjun Shi, won the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Best Student Paper Competition for his paper “Tractable Functional Response Modeling using Nonstationary Covariance Functions.”

Ph.D. student Luyi Gui won an honorable mention in the SPPSN Best Paper Competition for her paper "Fair and Efficient Implementation of Collective Extended Producer Responsibility Legislation," co-authored by her advisor, Associate Professor Ozlem Ergun, and Assistant Professor Atalay Atasu and Professor Beril Toktay from the Georgia Tech College of Management.

Guided by faculty advisor Donna C. Llewellyn, ISyE Senior Design undergraduate students Jacmara Katheryn Ching Sanchez, Santiago Diaz Kieffer, Antonio Elosua Cantu, Oscar Andres Harasic-Yaksic, Yonatan Dov Mintz, and Mario Solares Nassarwere were named honorable mention winners for the INFORMS Undergraduate Research Award for their project “Wind Turbine Offloading Optimization Strategy.”

ISyE faculty and students were also among those named finalists for this year’s INFORMS awards.

Assistant Professor Santanu Dey and Ph.D. student Diego Morán were named finalists in the Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Competition for their paper “Some Properties of Convex Hulls of Integer Points Contained in General Convex Sets.”

Professor Eva Lee was named a finalist for the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice for her paper “Biological Planning for High-Dose Rate Brachytherapy: Application to Cervical Cancer Treatment.”

Additionally, two students in the System Informatics and Control graduate program in ISyE were named finalists for the QSR Competition. Linkan Bian, advised by Associate Professor Nagi Gebraeel, was selected for his paper “Real-Time Prognostics for Multi-Component Systems with Degradation-Rate-Interactions,” and Kaibo Liu, advised by Professor Jianjun Shi, was selected for his paper “Physician Performance Assessment Using a Composite Quality Index.”

INFORMS, the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research, management science, and business analytics, serves the scientific and professional needs of Operations Researchers and those in the Management Sciences including educators, scientists, students, managers, and consultants.