Blackwell Prize: Past Winners

Francois Baccelli, senior researcher at INRIA/Paris and head of the European Research Council NEMO project on network mobility, is the 2024 Blackwell Prize winner. This award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society recognizes fundamental and sustained career contributions within the area of applied probability.

Francois Baccelli has been a prominent figure in the fields of applied probability and communications for several decades, making significant contributions through his extensive research and scholarly work. As the author of five influential books and over 200 research papers, Baccelli has profoundly advanced not only the theory of applied probability, stochastic geometry and dynamic systems, but also their applications to communication systems including wireless networks and Internet traffic. His notable contributions include pioneering work on stochastic spatial networks, elucidating the connections between Palm probabilities and queueing theory, and advancing the theory of stochastic geometry with key applications to wireless networks. Additionally, his development of the max-plus algebraic approach has offered valuable insights into the modeling and analysis of discrete event systems, further cementing his role as a leading innovator in his field.

Francois Baccelli has further made many leadership contributions to the field, in funding and directing a few distinct research groups throughout the years; in training an entire generation of graduate students, many of whom are now established professors and have branched out in multiple directions; and in organizing many research conferences. Quoting from one of the nomination letters, "in his gentle way [Baccelli] brings people together and lets things happen. He has an exceptional ability to see things from different perspectives, find the wider potential in an idea, see the practical relevance of an abstract idea and, conversely, the theoretical potential in a practical problem.

Onno Boxma, emeritus professor of Stochastic Operations Research at Eindhoven University of Technology, is the inaugural Blackwell Prize winner. This award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society recognizes fundamental and sustained career contributions within the area of Applied Probability.

Over the course of his career, Professor Boxma has established himself as a global leader within the Applied Probability community, who has made seminal contributions to queueing theory. In particular, his research on analytic methods in queueing theory, polling systems and conservation laws, heavy-tailed stochastic systems, and the analysis of queues and risk models fed by Levy processes, all comprise deep and influential work that has had profound impact on the field. Specifically, his monograph on boundary value analysis of queueing systems, co-authored with J.W. Cohen, remains a fundamental reference on this powerful approach, and includes a beautiful non-product characterization of the stationary distribution of an important coupled processor model. In the late eighties, he was the first to establish crucial work decomposition properties and pseudo-conservation laws for multi-class queueing systems and so-called polling systems in particular. The ideas developed within this body of work were later generalized to polyhedral characterizations of the achievable performance for multi-class queueing systems, and they continue to find application today in areas as diverse as wireless random-access communication networks and smart transportation systems. Within the domain of heavy-tailed queues, Professor Boxma brought classical Tauberian theorems to bear on this application area, as well as more probabilistic sample path methods, in developing deep insights into the interplay between tail behavior and scheduling. His more recent research has focused on the interface between queueing, risk theory, Markov additive processes, and Levy processes, and has led, for example, to novel identities for a class of two-dimensional reflected Levy processes, which appear new (and promising) even in the special case of reflected Brownian motion.

Onno Boxma has further made many leadership contributions to the field. ln training an entire generation of graduate students, many of whom are now established professors and have branched out in multiple directions, he has played a major role in creating the Dutch Queueing Theory school. He also has been of great service to the international community, as a founder and director of EURANDOM, as Editor-in-Chief of Queueing Systems, and as an organizer of many of the key conferences that have served a critical role within the community.