The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) announced the six finalist organizations that will compete for the 2014 INFORMS Franz Edelman Prize. The prestigious prize recognizes excellence in applying advanced operations research and analytics to transform business and human lives. Edelman finalist teams have improved organizational efficiency, increased profits, brought better products to consumers, helped foster peace negotiations, and saved lives. The 2014 Edelman Prize winner will be announced at the Edelman Gala on March 31 during the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research in Boston.  

Eva Lee and the Grady team worked on a project to model and optimize emergence department workflow for Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Lee was first inducted as INFORMS Franz Edelman Award Laureate in 2007 with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and their project on "Operations Research Advances Cancer Therapeutics.”

This year’s six finalists are:

• Grady Health System, with the Georgia Institute of Technology, for “Modeling and Optimizing Emergency Department Workflow.”
• Twitter, with Stanford University, for “The ‘Who to Follow’ System at Twitter: Strategy, Algorithms, and Revenue Impact.”
• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with Kid Risk, Inc.,for “Using Integrated Analytical Models to Support Global Health Policies to Manage Vaccine Preventable Diseases: Polio Eradication and Beyond.”
• The Energy Authority for “Hydroelectric Generation and Water Routing Optimizer.”
• Kidney Exchange at the Alliance for Paired Donation, with Boston College, Stanford, and MIT,for “Kidney Exchange.”
• NBN Company, with Biarri, for “Fiber Optic Network Optimization at NBN Co.”

Now in its 43rd year, the INFORMS Franz Edelman Prize competition recognizes outstanding examples of analytics and operations research projects that transform companies, entire industries and people’s lives. Using innovative advanced analytical methods, the teams were instrumental in helping their respective institutions make better decisions, providing a disciplined way by which management can improve organizational performance in a wide variety of situations and across both public and private organizations.