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. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 conference was held virtually from November 7-11.

A. Russell Chandler III Professor Santanu Dey was awarded the inaugural Egon Balas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society. The prize was established to honor an early career individual who has made significant contributions to the field of optimization.

Professor Renato Monteiro received the INFORMS Computing Society Award, along with his former student Sam Burer (Ph.D. 2001). Monteiro was also given this honor in 2001, making him one of the few researchers to receive it more than once.

Alumnus Weijun Xie (Ph.D. OR 2017) was honored with the INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers for his paper, "On Distributionally Robust Chance Constrained Programs with Wasserstein Distance," Mathematical Programming (Series A). He was advised by the late Professor Shabbir Ahmed.

First Place
Ph.D. student Arden Baxter won the Registration Award in the Bayer Women in Operations Research Scholarship Competition. Advisor: William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak.

Ph.D. student Jialei Chen won the 2020 INFORMS Best Student Paper Award in the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability Track for “Adaptive Design for Gaussian Process Regression under Censoring.” Advisors: Harold E. Smalley Professor Chuck Zhang and A. Russell Chandler III Professor Roshan Joseph. 

Ph.D. student Ana María Estrada Gómez won the QCRE Best Sudent Poster Award for “An Adaptive Sampling Strategy for Online Monitoring and Diagnosis of High-Dimensional Streaming Data.” Advisor: Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Kamran Paynabar.

Second Place
Digivijay Boob received second place in the INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize for “Stochastic First-Order Methods for Convex and Nonconvex Function,” jointly authored with Associate Professor George Lan and Qi Deng.

Ph.D. student Jialei Chen received the INFORMS Best Student Paper Runner-up Award (second place) in the Data Mining Track for “APIK: A Physics-Informed Kriging Model with Partial Differential Equations.” Advisors: Chuck Zhang and Roshan Joseph.

Daniela Hurtado-Lange and Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Siva Theja Maguluri received second place in the INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Best Paper competition for “Heavy-Traffic Analysis of Queueing Systems with No Complete Resource Pooling.”

Ph.D. student Shixiang “Woody” Zhu received second place in the Best Paper Competition for the 15th INFORMS Workshop on Data Mining and Decision Analytics. His paper is titled “Sequential Adversarial Anomaly Detection for Dependent Events.” Advisor: Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Yao Xie.

Third Place
A poster presentation by Arden Baxter on behalf of a Georgia Tech team (Baxter, William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak, Buse Eylul Oruc, Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Professor Nicoleta Serban, and John Asplund), “Homebound by Covid-19: The Benefits and Consequences of Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention Strategies,” received third place in the INFORMS Poster Competition.

Finalists
George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Turgay Ayer was selected as a finalist for the Sanjay and Panna Mehrotra Research Excellence Award, which recognizes a mid-career researcher for significant contributions to the practice of health applications through operations research and management science modeling and methodologies.

The paper, “Optimal Shape Control via L-Infinity Loss for Composite Fuselage Assembly,” coauthored by Juan Du, Shanshan Cao (Ph.D. 2019), Jeffery Hunt, A. Russell Chandler III Professor Xiaoming Huo, and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi, was a finalist for the Best Paper Award from the INFORMS Data Mining Section.

Andi Wang and Jan Shi were finalists in the INFORMS QSR Best Refereed Paper competition for “Holistic Modeling and Analysis of Multistage Manufacturing Processes with Sparse Effective Inputs and Mixed Profile Outputs.”

Lujia Wang was a finalist for the Best Paper Award (applied track) in the 15th INFORMS Workshop on Data Mining and Decision Analytics. Advisor: Professor Jing Li.

INFORMS Student Chapter 
The Georgia Tech INFORMS Student Chapter received cum laude recognition. The chapter is advised by Assistant Professor Lauren Steimle.