Once again, faculty, students, and alumni in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) were among those selected as winners for the various prizes and awards given at the 2014 INFORMS Annual Meeting, held November 9^th through 12^th in San Francisco, California.

Winners:

Kevin Hongfan Chen, IE 2014, and currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, won the INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research Award for his paper Robust Demand Response Portfolio Management under Operational Uncertainty, co-authored by ISyE Associate Professor Shijie Deng and ISyE Assistant Professor Andy Sun, who he was supervised by. 

ISyE postdoc Monica Gentili, Coca-Cola Associate Professor Nicoleta Serban and Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Associate Professor Julie Swann won the INFORMS 2014 Best Paper Award in the Public Sector in OR Section with their paper titled What are the areas in need for Improving Spatial Access to Pediatric Primary Care?

Fatma Kilinc-Karzan, Ph.D. IE 2011, won the 2014 JFIG Best Paper competition for her paper titled Two-Term Disjunctions on the Second-Order Cone. She is currently an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon and while at ISyE was a student of John Hunter Chair and Professor Arkadi Nemirovski.

ISyE alum, Jeff Linderoth, Ph.D. IE 1998, won the 2014 INFORMS Computing Society Prize. His advisor while at ISyE was James C. Edenfield Chair, Martin Savelsbergh.

Hao Yan, ISyE Ph.D. student, co-advised by ISyE Assistant Professor Kamran Paynabar and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi, won the 2014 INFORMS Data Mining Best Student Paper Award Competition.

Second place:

ISyE Ph.D. student Tonghoon Suk took home second place in the 2014 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition, for the paper Randomized longest-queue-first scheduling for large-scale buffered systems co-authored with advisor ISyE Fouts Family Associate Professor Ton Dieker.  Their paper will appear in the Journal of/Advances in Applied Probability.

Third place:

ISyE Assistant Professor Andy Sun won third place in the 2014 JFIG Best Paper competition for the paper titled Multistage Adaptive Robust Optimization for Electric Power Systems Operatio, co-authored by ISyE Ph.D. student Alvaro Lorca.

Finalists:

The Gwinnett County Senior Design team was a finalist for the 2014 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition for their paper Resource Allocation and Optimization for Advanced Voting in Gwinnett County. Team members include Mehran D’souza, Shi Gan, Andrew Luff, Peiqi Yang and they were advised by ISyE Fouts Family Associate Professor Ton Dieker.

The World Food Program Senior Design team was a finalist for the 2014 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition.  Team members include Maria Ayers, Laxmi Sangeeta Gadepalli, Ashfaque Kachwala, Tahsin Munir, Cane Punma, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Yuvraj Singh and they were advised by ISyE Adjunct Professor Ozlem Ergun.

ISyE Professor Eva Lee and ISyE Ph.D. student Fan Yaun were finalists for the 2014 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. This is a joint project with the CDC Strategic National Stockpile and Global Disease Detection and Emergency Response.

Jisu Jason Park, ISyE Ph.D. student, was a finalist for the 2014 INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research Prize. His advisor is ISyE Assistant Professor Seong-Hee Kim.

ISyE Ph.D. student Linwei Xin, co-advised by ISyE Professor Alex Shapiro and Assistant Professor Dave Goldberg, was a finalist in the MSOM student paper competition for his paper Optimality gap of constant-order policies decays exponentially in the lead time for lost sales models.

Also of note, the INFORMS Board appointed Martin Savelsbergh, James C. Edenfield Chair, Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science.

Also, Weihong Gu, a University of Michigan industrial and operations Ph.D. student, participated in the INFORMS Minority Issues Forum Poster Competition and won the first place for her poster, A Decision Support System on Surgical Treatments For Rotator Cuff Tears. This project was partially supported by the seed grant provided by Bill George, IE 1964, Honorary PhD IE 2008, and his wife Penny, through the George Family Foundation.  Kamran Paynanbar, ISyE assistant professor, was one of the collaborators on the project as well. 

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.