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2026 INFORMS Service Science Best Student Paper Award Finalists

  • 1.  2026 INFORMS Service Science Best Student Paper Award Finalists

    Posted 10 days ago

    The INFORMS Service Science Section is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2026 Best Student Paper Award.

    This year's competition received a large number of outstanding submissions spanning a broad range of topics and methodologies in service science. Following a rigorous review process, the following ten papers have been selected as finalists:

    1. Reducing Prescription Errors Through Information Intervention: A Field Experiment in Healthcare Operations
      Xiaodan Shao, Vivek Choudhary, and Arnab Majumdar

    2. Service-Induced Congestion in Memory-Constrained LLM Serving
      Gan Luo, Ruicheng Ao, Jing Dong, and David Simchi-Levi

    3. Preventing Catastrophic Wildfires: Annual Grid Inspection and Maintenance Plan
      Abolfazl Taghavi, Ali Fattahi, Sriram Dasu, and Reza Ahmadi

    4. Near-Optimal Personalization with Simple Transformers
      Lin An, Andrew A. Li, Vaisnavi Nemala, and Gabriel Visotsky

    5. Who to Offer, and When: Redesigning Feeding America's Real-Time Donation Tool
      Soonbong Lee, Vahideh Manshadi, and Daniela Saban

    6. Agentic AI and Human-in-the-Loop Interventions: Field Experimental Evidence from Alibaba's Customer Service Operations
      Chuan Zhu, Yiwei Wang, Tianjun Feng, Lauren Xiaoyuan Lu, and Bingxin Jia

    7. Market Design of Contest Platforms
      Zongsen Yang, Xiao Lei, Pin Gao, and Zizhuo Wang

    8. Video-Based AI Misconduct Monitoring: Unintended Consequences on Operational Outcomes
      Zhanzhi Zheng, Shenyang Jiang, Yuqian Xu, and Brad Staats

    9. Decision-Focused Bias Correction for Fluid Approximation
      Can Er and Mo Liu

    10. Online Learning for Dynamic Service Mode Control
      Wenqian Xing, Yue Hu, Anand Kalvit, and Vahid Sarhangian

    The finalist papers will be presented across two dedicated award sessions at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. 

    We warmly congratulate all the finalists and thank the competition judges for their time, expertise, and valuable service. We also sincerely thank all the students who submitted their work to this year's competition.

    We look forward to the finalist presentations in San Francisco!

    Competition Co-Chairs
    Sarah Yini Gao, Singapore Management University
    Ricky Roet-Green, University of Rochester
    Ruijie Zhang, ShanghaiTech University



    ------------------------------
    Sarah Yini Gao
    Associate Professor
    Singapore Management University
    Singapore
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