S. Raghavan wins INFORMS computing society prize

ISR-affiliated Associate Professor S. (Raghu) Raghavan (Smith School of Business) and colleagues Bruce Golden, Ed Wasil, Shreevardhan Lele, and Zhiwei Fu won the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science's (INFORMS) Computing Society Prize for their work in data mining. The prize was for a collection of three papers that describe state-of-the-art and novel genetic algorithms to design high-quality classification trees. The papers appeared from 2003-2005 in the journals Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and Computers and Operations Research. The prize promotes the development of high-quality work advancing the state of the art in operations research/computer science interface, publicizes and rewards the contributions of authors/researchers who have advanced the state of the art, and increases the visibility of excellent work in the field.

In addition, Raghavan, current Ph.D. student Ioannis Gamvros, and former MBA student Rick Nidel recently were finalists for INFORMS' prestigious Daniel H. Wagner Prize, given for excellence in operations management practice. Raghavan notes, " Past winners have included Merrill Lynch, IBM, GE, Bank One, IBM, and US WEST. Most of the finalists are typically fine-tuned decision support/operations groups in industry, making the selection of our student-led team quite noteworthy. Our project work involved a budget allocation problem for Catholic Relief Services, a not-for-profit agency that funds development programs and humanitarian relief efforts throughout the world."

Published February 18, 2006