Thanks to Mike Huck and Kerem Bulbul of Amazon Web Services, and the exceptional agility of the INFORMS staff (especially Cheryl Clarke, Darda Darden, under the leadership of Melissa Moore) we were able to pull-off a new student contest aimed at "fORging" the fields of Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics. I also wish to thank the judges, John Carlsson (USC), Anton Kleywegt (Ga. Tech.), and Mauricio Resende (Amazon) (and some "pinch-hitting" by Semih Atakan of Amazon). The insight, and responsiveness of the judges made this effort a pleasure for me to run. And of course, none of this would have been possible without the very encouraging response from the student-community and their faculty advisors; there were 18 entries, with several teams from overseas. I wish to thank the students for the energy and excitement they brought to this adventure. Hope to see many more in years to come. The overall winner of the contest was Priyadarshan Patil of the OR program at Univ. of Texas (Austin), the runner-up was a team from NC State (Saeed Chavoshi and Rahman Khorramfar) and the Honorable Mention went to a team from Univ. of Illinois (Roshanak Khalegi and Juan Xu). The awards were presented at the INFORMS Computing Society Business Meeting, and for that my thanks to Cole Smith and Simge Kucukyavuz, with photo credits to Mary Fenelon. Overall, a great team effort!
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Suvrajeet Sen
Professor
University of Southern California
Los Angeles CA
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