INFORMS Open Forum

Finalists of the fORged-by-Machines Contest

  • 1.  Finalists of the fORged-by-Machines Contest

    Posted 10-19-2019 19:16
    As many of you know, there is a new addition to contests for students, entitled "The fORged-by-Machines".  This effort was intended to encourage computational approached which integrate predictive and prescriptive analytics.  And, since computing power is one of the resources which helps forge these classes of models into agile decision tools, the contest was named as "fORged-by-Machines".   Very appropriately, the sponsor of this event is Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the INFORMS community is grateful for this sponsorship.

    There were a total of 17 entries, with some teams of 2.  The judges for this context were John Carlsson (USC), Anton Kleywegt (Georgia Tech.) and Mauricio Resende (Amazon).   After a lot of work and back-and-forth, the judges have picked three finalists on the basis of the announced criteria (clarity and justification of the policy, as well as the feasibility and performance of the recommended policy).   The finalists are: 

    Richard Alaimo and Heena Jain (Systems Eng. and Eng. Mgmt, University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
    Roshanak Khalegi and Juan Xu (Industrial and Enterprise Systems Eng. University of Illinois)
    Priyadarshan Patil (OR Program, Univ. of Texas, Austin).

    The above finalists will present their work in a special session (also sponsored by AWS) to be held in the Diamond Room of the Sheraton Downtown from 5-6 pm on Sunday, October 20, 2019. If you are attending the INFORMS conference, you are welcome to attend the presentations, as well as the reception, also sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Thanks for your interest and participation, and Good Luck to you with your exploration in the realm of Analytics. - Suvrajeet

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    Suvrajeet Sen
    Professor
    University of Southern California
    Los Angeles CA
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