2022 ICS Student Paper Award Winner
The 2022 INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper Award winner is Irina Wang (Princeton) for the paper "Mean Robust Optimization," co-authored with Cole Becker, Bart Van Parys (MIT), and Bartolomeo Stellato (Princeton)
This paper introduces a framework that combines robust optimization with Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization. Notably, her algorithm provides an elegant mechanism to balance the trade-off between computational effort and conservatism. In a nutshell, the technique reduces the data points significantly (expediting computation) and carefully (preserving fundamental properties). The framework is accompanied by elegant theory giving finite-sample performance guarantees and conditions for which clustering does not increase conservatism and otherwise provides bounds on the effect on conservatism. The paper illustrates the efficiency and effectiveness of the framework with a thorough and meticulous computational study. The committee also praises the authors for making their code publically available.
Runner up: Peijing Liu (USC) for the paper "A graph-based decomposition method for convex quadratic optimization with indicators," Mathematical Programming, 2022, co-authored with Salar Fattahi (Michigan), Andrés Gómez (USC), Simge Küçükyavuz (Northwestern).
The 2022 ICS Student Paper Award Committee members are:
- Erick Moreno-Centeno, Chair (Texas A&M)
- Manish Bansal (Virginia Tech)
- Susan Hunter (Purdue)
- Alain Zemkoho (Southampton)
2021 ICS Student Paper Award Winner
The 2021 INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper Award winner is Aras Selvi for the paper "Convex Maximization via Adjustable Robust Optimization."
The paper presents a novel connection between (linear and nonlinear) convex maximization, which arises in a wide range of challenging theoretical and application domains, and adjustable robust optimization (ARO). This leads to a unified scheme that recasts convex maximization as an ARO model and produces lower and upper bounds using ARO techniques. This scheme applies to, for example, quadratic, geometric, and sum-of-max-linear-terms optimization models with multiple constraints. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can provide tight lower and upper bounds to multiple classes of convex maximization problems. In addition, it does so in computation time that is comparable to, and in many cases significantly shorter than, that consumed by state-of-the-art solvers.
Runner up: Yongchun Li for the paper "Beyond Symmetry: Best Submatrix Selection for the Sparse Truncated SVD."
The 2021 ICS Student Paper Award Committee members are:
- Merve Bodur (Toronto)
- Andres Gomez (USC)
- Ruiwei Jiang, Chair (Michigan)
- Gonzalo Munoz (Universidad de O’Higgins)
- Eunhye Song (Penn State)