At the annual Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) conference, a number of faculty members and students from Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) received awards for their research. The conference was held from November 4-7 in Phoenix.

Winners

Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed received the 2018 Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society. The society cited Ahmed’s “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of stochastic discrete optimization.” The Farkas Prize was established in 2006 and is awarded at the INFORMS annual meeting to a mid-career researcher for outstanding contributions to the field of optimization over the course of their career.

George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Turgay Ayer, in joint work with researchers from University of Texas at Dallas, won the eBusiness Section Best Paper Award for “When IT Creates Legal Vulnerability: Not Just Overutilization but Underprovisioning of Health Care  Could Be a Consequence.”

The paper deals with the increased litigation risk that may be associated with defensive medicine, a physician behavior characterized by providing more care than necessary due to fear of litigation. In a medical litigation case, clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are considered as inculpatory or exculpatory evidence, but the formulation of CPGs with respect to precision of CPGs is still in question. In this paper, the authors examine the effects of defensive medicine on care delivery under expanded information sharing, and identify screening guidelines that maximize the social welfare.

Ph.D. student Beste Basciftci received the INFORMS ENRE Best Student Paper Award for “Stochastic Optimization of Maintenance and Operations Schedules under Unexpected Failures,” co-authored with Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed, Georgia Power Early Career Professor and Professor Nagi Gebraeel, and Murat Yildirim (Ph.D. 16).

The paper develops a novel stochastic optimization framework for jointly optimizing maintenance and operations schedules of a fleet of generators with explicit consideration of sensor-driven unexpected failure scenarios by leveraging data analytics. The authors’ extensive results on illustrative instances highlight significant cost savings and reductions in generator failures compared to existing scheduling approaches, in addition to computational benefits of their solution methodology with algorithmic enhancements and parallel implementation.

Fouts Family Professor Natashia Boland, Mike Hewitt (Ph.D. 09), Luke Marshall (Ph.D. 17), and James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor Martin Savelsbergh received the Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Section Best Paper Award for “The Continuous-time Service Network Design Problem.”

The paper deals with the use of time discretization in service network design models, specifically answering the question, “Is it possible to produce an optimal continuous-time solution without explicitly modeling each point in time?” The team’s work developed an iterative refinement algorithm using partially time-expanded networks that solves continuous-time service network design problems.

Ph.D. student Mostafa Reisi won the Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Multiple Tensor-on-Tensor Regression: An Approach for Modeling Processes with Heterogeneous Sources of Data,” co-authored with Hao Yan (Ph.D. 16), Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Kamran Paynabar, and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi.

The authors developed a general multiple tensor-on-tensor regression framework (called MTOT) that employs tensor algebra to effectively integrate heterogeneous inputs to predict a high-dimensional output. The MTOT consolidates and generalizes the function-on-scalar, scalar-on-function, and function-on-function regression frameworks and allows for any form of structured data to be included in the modeling process. The key advantage of the MTOT is that it learns several basis matrices, in accordance to the relationship between the inputs and the output, to capture the correlation structure of the HD data and to perform dimensionality reduction.

Assistant Professor He Wang received first place in the Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) paper competition for the work “A Re-solving Heuristic with Uniformly Bounded Loss for Network Revenue Management,” coauthored with Ph.D. student Pornpawee Bumpensanti.

Wang and Bumpensanti’s paper studies how a firm can maximize its revenue given limited resources and time. This is known as the "network revenue management" problem and has a wide range of applications in the airline, hotel, and retail industries. The paper proposes a new algorithm for this problem and proves that the algorithm achieves the best possible theoretical performance (i.e., a constant loss).

Third Place

Weijun Xie (Ph.D. 17) was awarded third place in the Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Best Paper competition for “On Distributionally Robust Chance Constrained Program with Wasserstein Distance.”

Honorable Mention

Assistant Professor Swati Gupta, Song Zhou (Cornell University), and Madeleine Udell (Cornell University) received an honorable mention in the Undergraduate Operations Research Prize for their joint work, “Limited Memory Kelley’s Method Converges for Composite Convex and Submodular Objectives.”

George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Turgay Ayer, Ph.D. student Zhaowei She, and Daniel Montanera (Georgia State University) received an honorable mention for the Public Sector Operations Research Best Paper Award for “Pay for Performance or Pay for Selection? An Analysis of the Capitation Payment Models in Health Care.”

Finalists

Ph.D. student Pornpawee Bumpensanti was a finalist in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM) Student Paper Competition for the work “A Re-solving Heuristic with Uniformly Bounded Loss for Network Revenue Management,” coauthored with Assistant Professor He Wang.

Ph.D. student Juan Du, Xiaowei Yue (Ph.D. 18), Jeffrey H. Hunt (Boeing), and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi were finalists for the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Section Best Refereed Paper Award for “Optimal Placement of Actuators for Composite Fuselage Shape Control."

Ph.D. student Shuang Li was a finalist in the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Section Best Student Paper Competition for the work “Scan B-Statistic for Kernel Change-point Detection.” Li also was a finalist in the Social Media Analytics Student Paper Competition for “Detecting Changes in Dynamic Events over Networks." Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Yao Xie is a co-author for both papers.

Ph.D. student Ruizhi Zhang was a finalist in the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Section Best Student Paper Competition for the work “Scalable Robust Monitoring of Large-scale Data Streams,” co-authored with Associate Professor Yajun Mei and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi.