2006 ICS Prize Winners
The 2006 ICS Prize was awarded to John Drew, Diane L. Evans, Andrew G. Glen, and Lawrence Leemis.
The winning team was awarded the Prize for their body of work in five papers:
- APPL: A Probability Programming Language
- The Distribution of Order Statistics for Discrete Random Variables with Applications to Bootstrapping
- Computing the Distribution of the Product of Two Continuous Random Variables
- Computing the Cumulative Distribution Function of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Statistic
- A Generalized Univariate Change-of-Variable Transformation Technique
In awarding the prize the committee gave the following citation: "These papers form the core of an innovative body of work on computation in applied probability with operations research applications. The authors have introduced a probability programming language and demonstrated how to use it with applications at several corporations, government agencies, and academic institutions. These publications contribute significantly to computational probability and its practice at the interface of operations research and computer science."
2006 ICS Prize Committee:
- Gerald Brown (Chair)
- Michael Ball
- Pierre L'Ecuyer
2005 ICS Prize Winners
The 2005 ICS Prize was awarded to Zhiwei Fu (Fannie Mae and previously, University of Maryland), Bruce L. Golden, Shreevardhan Lele, S. Raghavan (all from the University of Maryland) and Edward A. Wasil (American University).
The winning team was awarded the Prize for their body of work in three papers:
- A Genetic Algorithm-Based Approach for Building Accurate Decision Trees, INFORMS Journal on Computing 15 (2003) 322.
- Genetically Engineered Decision Trees: Population Diversity Produces Smarter Trees, Operations Research 51 (2003) 894907.
- Diversification for Better Classification Trees, Computers & Operations Research (2005) in press.
In awarding the prize the committee gave the following citation: "This work describes innovative methods for constructing classification trees in very large data sets. Ideas from statistics and heuristic search are combined to produce methods that are fast, accurate, and of high quality as measured by several newly proposed performance measures. These methods are applicable to a variety of data mining problems of practical size, and represent a significant contribution to knowledge and practice at the interface of operations research and computer science."
2005 ICS Prize Committee:
- Robert Fourer (Chair)
- Gerald Brown
- Hanif Sherali
2004 ICS Prize Winners
The 2004 ICS Prize was awarded to Nikolaos V. Sahinidis and Mohit Tawarmalani for their contributions to the field of Nonlinear global optimization summarized in their book Convexification and Global Optimization in Continuous and Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming, and embodied in the BARON software package
The work embodied in this book and the BARON software package comprises a path-breaking advance in the theory and computational practice of optimizing nonconvex nonlinear models. Mathematical programming methods have traditionally only been able to compute local optima of such models, and practitioners seeking global optima had to resort to a variety of heuristic and ad hoc techniques. This work, drawing on original contributions of the authors and the work of many other researchers, addresses the computation of provably global optima by bringing together a variety of mathematical programming techniques ranging from branch and bound to convex analysis. It thus unites a number of traditionally separate research areas in creating an enabling technology for new application fields. The book also includes interesting engineering applications, with computational results giving persuasive proof of the work's usefulness. Given the challenging nature of the models it addresses, the success of BARON is remarkable. Work of this nature opens up new applications for the future of mathematical programming.
2003 ICS Prize Winner
The 2003 ICS Prize was awarded to Ignacio Grossmann for his many contributions to Nonlinear Mixed Integer Programming and Process Design
Ignacio Grossmann has made fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP). His pioneering paper with Marco Duran on the Outer Approximation (OA) decomposition algorithm showed that it dominated Generalized Benders Decomposition for a large and important class of MINLP's. He was instrumental in developing the DICOPT implementation of OA, coupling it to the GAMS modeling language, and extending its logic to deal with problems that are non-convex in the continuous variables. DICOPT is now one of the most widely used MINLP solvers, and is largely responsible for making MINLP a viable tool for practical problem solving.
Professor Grossmann has also made fundamental contributions in formulating industrially significant engineering design problems as optimization problems, with emphasis on the incorporation of logic-based modeling and algorithms. He has proposed useful measures of flexibility, and shown how to optimize flexible processes. He and his students developed ways to incorporate logical constraints into branch and bound logic which greatly speeded solution. His recent work on disjunctive programming and constraint programming maintains his high standards. In addition, he is widely recognized for his skills in recognizing and encouraging PhD students
2002 ICS Prize Winner
Pascal Van Hentenryck, Brown University, was awarded "The 2002 INFORMS Computing Society Prize for Research Excellence In The Interface Between Operations Research And Computer Science" for for his many contributions to The field of Constraint Programming and its integration into Operations Research. The prize was awarded at the National Meeting of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), held in San Jose, CA, USA.