The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) has recently announced a list of finalists for its various prizes and awards to be given at the upcoming 2011 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina on November 13.  Students and faculty of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) were among those selected.

Students Morgan Doty, Bryce Dykes, Kathleen Hendrix, Ralph Long, Dana Lupuloff, Douglas Meagh, Jeff Phillips, and Michael  Vallecoccia were selected as one of six finalists for the Doing Good with Good OR Student Competition for their submission, “Gwinnett County Public Schools: OR/MS Drives Improvements in Bus Logistics and School Times.”  The submission was a a solution to help Gwinnett County Public Schools reduce transportation expenses in the face of considerable budget cuts.  By developing assignment and scheduling heuristics implemented by a user friendly application and informed by a regression and forecast, the total number of buses needed for daily transportation was reduced significantly.  The overall reduction of over 100 buses resulted in an initial savings of $2.9 million and recurring savings of $2.6 million each year.

Guided by faculty advisor Dr. Julie Swann, students Doty, Dykes, Hendrix, Long, Lupuloff, Meagh, Phillips, and Vallecoccia completed this project as part of their required ISyE course, Senior Design, where they were also chosen as one of the top three finalists out of twenty-four Senior Design teams. 

Turgay Ayer, assistant professor of ISyE, was also selected as a finalist for the Doing Good with Good OR Student Competition for his submission “Redesigning the Breast Cancer Screening Policies: Personalized Mammography Screening,” which he submitted while studying for his doctorate at University of Wisconsin-Madison.   Additionally, Ayer was chosen as a finalist for the Decision Analysis Society Student Paper Competition for his paper “A POMDP Approach to Personalize Mammography Screening Policies,” as well as a finalist for the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society Student Paper Competition.

Daniel Dadush, an Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization PhD student at Georgia Tech, was selected as the winner of the Optimization Society Student Paper Prize for his paper “On the Chvatal-Gomory Closure of a Compact Convex Set.”  The paper was co-authored with Santanu Dey, assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), and Juan Pablo Vielma, who received his PhD from ISyE in 2009 and was the 2007 recipient of the Optimization Society Student Paper Prize. Vielma is currently the assistant professor in the department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. The prize is awarded annually at the INFORMS Fall National Meeting for an outstanding paper in optimization by a student author.  Also for this paper submission, Dadush, Dey, and Vielma were nominated as finalists for the Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Award.

Eva K. Lee, professor of ISyE and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare, was selected as a finalist for the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. Lee will deliver a thirty minute presentation on her submission "Designing Guest Flow and Operations Logistics for the Dolphin Tales" during one of the Wagner Prize sessions.

Antonius Dieker, assistant professor of ISyE, was nominated as a finalist for the Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Competition for his submission "Sensitivity Analysis for Diffusion Processes Constrained to an Orthant." The paper was co-authored by Dieker's PhD student, Xuefeng Gao.

Shan Ba, PhD student in ISyE, was nominated as a finalist for the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability Best Student Paper Award for the paper "Multi-layer Designs for Computer Experiments," co-authored with Roshan Vengazhiyil, associate professor in ISyE.

INFORMS, the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (OR), 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.