Dear colleagues,
It is our pleasure to announce the finalists of the 2020 Nicholson Prize. We received 119 high-quality submissions this year, making the judging process extremely selective. We are very thankful to our committee of judges for narrowing down this pool to five finalists. The winner will be announced on November 11th, and all finalists will present their work in a special session at the Virtual Annual Meeting. Here are the finalists in alphabetical order:
Decision Forest: A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Irrational Choice
Student author: Yi-Chun Chen (UCLA)
Mixed-Projection Conic Optimization:A New Paradigm for Modeling Rank Constraints
Student authors: Ryan Cory-Wright and Jean Pauphilet (MIT)
On the Optimality of Affine Policies for Budgeted Uncertainty Sets
Student author: Omar El Housni (Columbia University)
Smoothness-Adaptive Contextual Bandits
Student author: Ahmadreza Momeni (Stanford University)
Bypassing the Monster: A Faster and Simpler Optimal Algorithm for Contextual Bandits under Realizability
Student author: Yunzong Xu (MIT)
Congratulations to the finalists, and many thanks to the committee members for their work and support!
Bernardo Pagnoncelli (UAI, Chile) and Hamsa Bastani (Wharton)
Co-chairs of the 2020 Nicholson prize
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Bernardo Pagnoncelli
Associate Professor
Universidad Adolfo Ibanez
Santiago
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