On behalf of the INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research Prize Competition judging committee, I am pleased to announce the 6 finalists for this year's competition in the alphabetical order of the presenting author's last name. The finalists will present their exciting work in the upcoming INFORMS annual conference in Seattle, WA. The two sessions they will be presenting are SC32 and SD32 – CC, Room 6C, on Sunday, October 20, 1:30 – 3 pm and 4:30 – 6 pm.
Please come to Sunday (10/20) evening's Award Ceremony for announcing the winner.
- A Branch-and-Bound Framework for Infinite-horizon Multi-model Markov Decision Processes
Vinayak Ahluwalia, , University of Michigan
Faculty co-authors: Lauren Steimle, Brian Denton
- Incorporating Equity into the School Bus Scheduling Problem
Dipayan Banerjee, Northwestern University
Faculty co-authors: Karen Smilowtz
- Optimal Re-allocation of Pay and Display Machines for Toronto Parking Authority
Milan preet Kaur, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
Student co-authors: Mandeep Hanspal, Jui Champaneri, Sathana Srikantan
Faculty co-authors: Houra Mahmoudzadeh
- Demonstration of Potential Threats to Health Privacy from Artificial Intelligence
Liangyuan Na, University of California -- Berkeley
Student co-authors: Cong Yang (co first-author), Chicheng (co first-author) Lo, Fangyuan Zhao
Faculty co-authors: Anil Aswani, Yoshimi Fukuoka
- Deterministic upper bounds for equality and inequality constrained problems in global minimization
Hendrik Ott, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
Faculty co-authors: Steffen Rebennack, Christen Füllner.
- Energy Aware Scheduling of a Material Handling Robot in an m-Machine Robotic Cell
Rabia Taspinar, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey
Faculty co-authors: Hakan Gultekin, Sinan Gurel
I want to use this opportunity to thank all the student authors not only the ones above but also other undergraduate students who submitted their high-quality entries to the competition. These students exemplify a group of finest talents coming to our OR/MS profession. Last but not the least, on behalf of the competition committee, I also want to send the sincere appreciation to their faculty or research advisors. The success of these students is indispensable to the tireless mentoring and encouragement of their research advisors.
------------------------------
Nan Kong
Associate Professor
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN
------------------------------