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Recent Faculty and student Awards and Honors
We are pleased to announce the following recent accomplishments of our Faculty, students, and Alumni.
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Hamsa Balakrishnan was awarded the Kevin Corker Award for Best Paper of ATM-2011 (9th USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Seminar), for the paper "Demonstration of Reduced Airport Congestion through Pushback Rate Control." Authors: I. Simaiakis, H. Khadilkar, H. Balakrishnan, T. G. Reynolds and R. J. Hansman (MIT), and B. Reilly and S. Urlass (FAA). Berlin, Germany, June 2011.
Hamsa Balakrishnan was also awarded the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Lawrence Sperry Award (2012) "for the development and implementation of advanced air traffic management techniques leading to significant environmental improvements.” The award recognizes notable contributions by a young person to the advancement of aeronautics or astronautics.
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Cynthia Barnhart was a elected as an INFORMS Fellow, Class of 2011.
INFORMS fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. They have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and made significant contributions to the advancement of OR/MS over a period of time.
Their service to the profession and to INFORMS has culminated in election to the INFORMS Fellow Award.
Award Website
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Allison Chang was a finalist for the INFORMS Data Mining Student Paper Award, 2011.
The award is given to the best paper, as judged by a panel of members of the Section, on any topic related to data mining by a student author.
Award Website
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Louis Anthony (Tony) Cox Jr. was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (February 2012).
For applications of operations research and risk analysis to significant national problems.
Award Website
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Juliane Dunkel was awarded Honorable Mention in the INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition, 2011.
The George Nicholson Student Paper Competition is held each year to honor outstanding papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences written by a student. The prize is given each year at the National Meeting if there is a suitable recipient. Up to six awards (first and second place awards and up to four awards for Honorable Mention) may be given upon recommendation of the selection committee. First place carries a cash award of $600, second place $300, and each honorable mention $100. All of the finalists are also presented with certificates.
Award Website
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Vivek Farias has won First Place in the INFORMS JFIG (Junior Faculty Interest Group) paper competition, 2011.
The Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Forum invites submissions to the JFIG paper competition. JFIG Forum was created in 2001 to promote the career development of tenure-track faculty in INFORMS. The goals of the paper competition are to encourage research among junior faculty and to increase the visibility of research conducted by junior faculty within the fields of operations research and management science.
The winning paper (co-authored with V. Desai and C. Moallemi, both of Columbia University), entitled “Approximate Dynamic Programming via a Smoothed Linear Program,” is forthcoming in Operations Research.
Award Website
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Douglas Fearing was awarded First Prize in the INFORMS Aviation Applications Dissertation Prize, 2011.
The Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS awards a prize for the best dissertation in any area related to aviation OR (air traffic management OR and airline OR). The winner will receive a plaque and an honorarium of five hundred dollars. Finalists will receive an honorable mention and a certificate.
Award Website
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David Gamarnik is the recipient of the 2011 Best Publication Award from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS. David received the award with Dmitriy Katz-Rogozhnikov for the following papers:
- “On Deciding Stability of Constrained Homogeneous Random Walks and Queueing Systems,” Gamarnik, Mathematics of Operations Research, 2002, Vol. 27, 272-293;
- “On the Undecidability of Computing Stationary Distributions and Large Deviation Rates for Constrained Random Walks,” Gamarnik, Mathematics of Operations Research, 2007, Vol. 32, 257-265;
- “On Deciding Stability of Multiclass Queueing Networks under Buffer Priority Scheduling Policies,” Gamarnik and Katz, The Annals of Applied Probability, 2009, Vol. 19, 2008-2037.
Stability is one of the most fundamental properties of stochastic networks, and its verification needs to precede any performance analysis of the network in stationarity, That is one of the primary reasons why finding stability conditions for stochastic networks has been a subject of extensive and continuing research in applied probability and queueing theory. While exact stability conditions have been identified in some special classes of networks, the problem remains very difficult in general settings.
This series of papers provides a novel, deep and unexpected insight into the inherent difficulty of the problem. It shows that, in general, network stability is an undecidable property, in the sense of Turing. These are the first undecidability results in the context of queueing theory, thus establishing a remarkable connection between the theory of queueing systems and stochastic processes on the one hand, and the classical theory of algorithms and computations, on the other. Moreover, this work shows that for certain classes of models, even when stability is known in advance (for example, via existence of suitable Lyapunov functions), the problems of computing stationary distributions and/or large deviation rates can still be undecidable.
Thus, by combining probabilistic and theoretical computer science tools, the papers obtain major new results in stochastic networks. The approach promises to be very fruitful and to generate significant impact on future research in the area, as already exemplified by the authors’ recent follow-up work on the undecidability of the stability of the Skorohod problem.
The APS Prize Committee:
Onno Boxma
Alexander Stolyar, Chair
Assaf Zeevi
APS Awards Website
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Patrick Jaillet and Michael Wagner were awarded the Glover-Klingman Prize, 2010.
The Glover-Klingman Prize is awarded each year to an individual or a group for the best paper published in Networks. Each co-author of the winning paper will receive a certificate and a cash award.
The winning paper: Jaillet, P and M. Wagner, "Almost sure asymptotic optimality for online routing and machine scheduling problems," Volume 55, Issue 1, January 2010, pp. 2–12.
Award Website
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Retsef Levi, along with co-authors Kelsey McCarty (Massachusetts General Hospital) and Jeremie Gallien (London Business School; formerly of MIT Sloan), has won the ecch Case Awards 2012 New Case Writer competition. Their winning case is entitled, “Massachusetts General Hospital's Pre-Admission Testing Area (PATA).”
ecch is the largest single source of management case studies in the world, with more than 75,000 items in its catalogue. Since 1991, ecch Case Awards (formerly the European Case Awards) have been presented annually to recognize worldwide excellence in case writing and to raise the profile of the case method of learning. The competition attracted a high number of entries, with 64 cases submitted from 57 institutions in 27 countries.
Award Website
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Andy Sun was awarded Second Prize in the INFORMS George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award, 2011.
The George B. Dantzig Award is given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. This award has been established to encourage academic research that combines theory and practice and stimulates greater interaction between doctoral students (and their advisors) and the world of practice. The award is given at the National Meeting. All certificates read as follows (First and Second Prizes): for the best dissertation that is innovative and relevant to the practice of operations research and the management sciences.
Award Website
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Wei Sun was awarded Second Prize in the INFORMS Services Science Section Best Paper Competition, 2011. Wei received the award with Georgia Perakis for the following paper:
"Congestion Pricing for Service Industries"
The Services Science Section of INFORMS announces the Best Paper Award to recognize excellence among its members. The awards program brings prestige to the Service Science Section as well as to the recipients honored.
The INFORMS Section on Service Science promotes and disseminates research and applications among professionals interested in theory, methodologies, and applications in Service Science, Engineering and Practice; and provides a forum for the exchange of new ideas in Service Science, Engineering and Practice.
Award Website
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Garrett van Ryzin with Guillermo Gallego was awarded the INFORMS Revenue Management Historical Prize, 2011.
The INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize for Historical Works was created to recognize critical contributions to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English, prior to 1999. The prize includes a certificate and a cash award. The prize is awarded at the INFORMS National Meeting at the discretion of the Prize Committee. At most one such prize may be awarded each year.
Award Website
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Yehua Wei was awarded Second Prize in the INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition, 2011.
The George Nicholson Student Paper Competition is held each year to honor outstanding papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences written by a student. The prize is given each year at the National Meeting if there is a suitable recipient. Up to six awards (first and second place awards and up to four awards for Honorable Mention) may be given upon recommendation of the selection committee. First place carries a cash award of $600, second place $300, and each honorable mention $100. All of the finalists are also presented with certificates.
Award Website
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