INFORMS Open Forum

INFORMS Undergraduate O.R. Paper Competition Results

  • 1.  INFORMS Undergraduate O.R. Paper Competition Results

    Posted 11-18-2016 18:36

    Dear all:

    Below are the results of the 2016 INFORMS Undergraduate O.R. Paper Competition. Winners were announced during the Awards Ceremony at the Annual Meeting in Nashville. The photo of all finals and the award winners is here.

    We had a remarkable slate of entries this year, reflecting the strength and diversity of undergraduate O.R. projects, whether applied or theoretical, in the U.S. or abroad, and represent the very best of tomorrow's generation of operations research practitioners. All the finalists did excellent work and will undoubtedly lead with great skill and talent the next generation of operations research practitioners.

    The four finalists who ended the competition with finalist spots are :

    1. Zeynep Yaprak Besik, Başak Erman, Deniz Berfin Karakoc, Yekta Jehat Mizrakli, Umut Mururoglu and Egehan Yanik , “ETI hot delivery system logistics optimization”, Bilkent University, Turkey. In collaboration with Oğuzhan Vicil.
    2. Hale Erkan, “Collaborative Decision Making for Air Traffic Management”, Bilkent University, Turkey. In collaboration with Nesim K. Erkip and Ozge Safak.
    3. Sameer Manchanda and Mikaela Meyer, “On Comprehensive Mass Spectrometry Data Analysis for Quality Assessment of Biological Samples”, Purdue University, USA. In collaboration with Nan Kong, Qianqian Li and Yan Li.
    4. Jacob Monroe, “Allocating Countermeasures to Defend Water Distribution Systems Against Terrorist Attack”, North Carolina State University, USA. In collaboration with Emily Berglund and Elizabeth Ramsey.

    The two honorable mentions are :

    1. Cem Aydın, Alp Arıbal, Cansu Erol and Begum Tuglu, “A Reformulation of the Appointment Scheduling Problem with Customer Choice Behavior and Multiple Customer Types”, Koc University, Turkey. In collaboration with Lerzan Örmeci.
    2. Hari Bandi, “Regularized Linear Regression via Robust Optimization Lens”, IIT Kharagpur, India. In collaboration with Vineet Goyal and Garud Iyengar.

    The first-place winner is :

    1. Joy Chang, “Carsharing Fleet Location Design with Mixed Vehicle Types for CO2 Emission Reduction”, University of Michigan, USA. In collaboration with Siqian Shen and Ming Xu.

    Further, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my fellow committee members for their tireless efforts in evaluating and discussing the papers submitted to this year's competition: Dr. Matthew Drake, Dr. Nelson Uhan, Dr. Allison Chang and Dr. Murat Kurt.

    Dr. Murat Kurt has kindly agreed to serve as the competition chair for 2017. The deadline for submissions is expected to be July 1, 2017. Please check the INFORMS website for more details in the spring.

    Finally, I'd like to thank all the students who submitted a paper to the competition and their advisors for supervising their work. It was a pleasure to read about the many innovative and useful ways today's undergraduate students apply operations research to tackle important problems. The entire 2016 committee wishes them the best in their future endeavors.

    Regards,

    Pavithra

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    Pavithra Harsha
    IBM Research
    Yorktown Heights NY
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