Recognizing Excellence

INFORMS President's Award

SHELDON JACOBSON
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The purpose of this award is to recognize, and thereby encourage, important contributions to the welfare of society by members of our profession at the local, national, or global level.

About Sheldon Jacobson

Sheldon H. Jacobson is a Founder Professor of Computer Science, director of the Simulation and Optimization Laboratory, and founding director of the Bed Time Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Citation

The 2023 INFORMS President’s Award is awarded to Professor Sheldon H. Jacobson for advancing the field of operations research through his research that has influenced national policy, his influential role in communicating his research contributions to the public, and for his exceptional service to INFORMS and the broader operations research community.

Jacobson is a Founder Professor of Computer Science, director of the Simulation and Optimization Laboratory, and founding director of both the Bed Time Research Institute and Institute of Computational Redistricting at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research record is outstanding and extensive, spanning several methodology and application areas. His methodological research focuses on discrete-event simulation optimization and decision-making under uncertainty, and his applied research contributions focus on homeland security, healthcare, and public health. He has made several seminal research contributions, all focusing on applying operations research to address societal problems of national interest. His research has been widely recognized by his peers, and he has briefed government policymakers on his research findings.

Professor Jacobson’s service to the profession of operations research spans multiple directions. Notable service contributions include serving as a program director at the National Science Foundation (2012-2014) and serving on National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committees. Professor Jacobson is a thought leader who has communicated his research findings to numerous stakeholders and the general public. He has leveraged his research to bring media attention to important scientific issues, where he has showcased the application of operations research to issues of national concern.

Professor Jacobson has served in numerous roles within INFORMS for more than three decades. He served as the general chair of the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, the first fully in-person meeting after the COVID-19 pandemic, that introduced a new format with events and workshops to provide additional options for learning. He served as treasurer on the INFORMS Board of Directors (2015-2016) and served on numerous committees. Additionally, he has been a devoted mentor to many members of the operations research community. INFORMS is extremely grateful to Professor Jacobson for his contributions to the profession of operations research through his service, and the impact that he has had in “making the world a better place.”

Professor Jacobson’s research and service efforts will have a lasting impact on future generations of operations research professionals. It gives me immense pleasure to bestow this year’s President’s Award on Professor Sheldon Jacobson.

George E. Kimball Medal

JONATHAN OWEN, Ph.D., CAPGeneral Motors

The George E. Kimball Medal is awarded for recognition of distinguished service to the Institute and to the profession of operations research and the management sciences. The award is a medallion and certificate.

About Jonathan Owen, CAP

Jonathan H. Owen, Ph.D., CAP, is chief scientist for OR/MS and Analytics, General Motors, and director of GM’s Advanced Analytics Center of Expertise (AACE).

Citation

Jonathan Owen, Ph.D., CAP, is director of the Advanced Analytics Center of Excellence and chief scientist for OR/MS and Analytics at General Motors. He has volunteered substantial service and leadership in a variety of capacities at INFORMS. He served on INFORMS Board of Directors as Vice President of Practice Activities, advocating for stronger collaborative ties between the academic and practitioner communities. He represented GM on the INFORMS Roundtable for 14 years and has served 7 years on its Board of Directors, including two terms as president. He played a pivotal role in implementing the Certified Analytics Professional program. Owen has also been active in promoting the public understanding of contributions to society made by the OR/MS profession.

Owen’s awards include the 2005 Franz Edelman Award, INFORMS Prize, Daniel H. Wagner Prize finalist, IISE Outstanding Middle Career IE Leadership Award for Business/Industry, SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award, among others. He was inducted as an INFORMS Fellow in 2018 and IISE Fellow in 2023. He is an eight-time recipient (the most ever awarded) of GM’s “Boss” Kettering Award for outstanding innovations, which have provided substantial benefit to GM and serve as excellent examples of OR/MS real-world impact.

Steve Graves
MIT

About Steve Graves

Stephen Graves is the Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management and Professor Post Tenure in the Operations Management group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has a joint appointment with the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Citation

Stephen C. Graves has been a remarkably influential and effective leader in the governance and administration of INFORMS (ORSA/TIMS), an award winning and distinguished researcher and practitioner, a leader in service to our journals, and a leader in advising students and practitioners. He has also been an instrumental leader in recognizing and promoting the high-quality, applied work of others.

As president of INFORMS, he was instrumental in guiding the organization through the financial disruption and uncertainty caused by COVID-19 as well as in helping to establish a new strategic plan for INFORMS. Through his editorship of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and other editorial responsibilities, he attracted exceptional research articles with a focus on practice as well as theory. As long-term editor of the Edelman Special Issues of INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (formerly Interfaces), as well as in serving as a member of the Edelman Award Committee, Professor Graves played a central role in selecting best practice accomplishments and worked closely with practitioners so that they could effectively communicate their contributions to a broad range of OR/MS professionals.

John von Neumann Theory Prize

Christos Papadimitriou
Columbia University

The John von Neumann Theory Prize is awarded annually to a scholar (or scholars in the case of joint work) who has made fundamental, sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences.

About Christos Papadimitriou

Christos Charilaos Papadimitriou is a Greek theoretical computer scientist and the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Citation

The 2023 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize is awarded to Christos H. Papadimitriou and Mihalis Yannakakis for their fundamental and sustained contributions to computational complexity theory and providing an understanding of the limits of efficient solvability for a wide range of decision and optimization problems central to operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS).

As an example of a major contribution, Papadimitriou and Yannakakis introduced Max-NP and Max-SNP, natural variants of the NP complexity class, comprised of certain optimization problems that can be approximated with bounded error (Papadimitriou & Yannakakis 1988). Within these classes, they showed that several common problems have polynomial-time approximation schemes only if the whole class does.

Other major contributions include establishing the NP-completeness of the Euclidean traveling salesman problem (Papadimitriou 1977), an early tour de force in the traditional framework, and characterizing the complexity of many other natural problems. Examples include: checking the validity of facets of polytopes (Papadimitriou and Yannakakis 1984); determining whether a problem has a unique optimal solution (Papadimitriou 1984); local search (Johnson, Papadimitriou and Yannakakis 1988); the extension complexity of LP formulations for the matching and traveling salesman problems (Yannakakis 1988), a paper that erected a firewall to scores of would-be P=NP proofs; and computing Nash equilibria. In the online setting, their work on finding online solutions with a bounded competitive ratio (Papadimitriou and Yannakakis 1991, 1993) has been highly influential. Finally, the introduction of the concept of the “price of anarchy” (Koutsoupias & Papadimitriou 1999, Yannakakis 2009) was a catalyst for major developments in algorithmic game theory, substantially reinforcing the links between economics, computer science, and operations research.

Such contributions have addressed modeling and computational issues at the core of multiple areas in OR/MS; they have helped characterize what is possible and inherently impossible, and more broadly, have provided new tools for such characterizations. Their work has resolved fundamental open problems and sparked new and fruitful lines of research, leading to a better understanding of the field of optimization at large.

Mihalis Yannakakis
Columbia University

About Mihalis Yannakakis

Mihalis Yannakakis is professor of computer science at Columbia University. He is noted for his work in computational complexity, databases, and other related fields.

Citation

The 2023 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize is awarded to Christos H. Papadimitriou and Mihalis Yannakakis for their fundamental and sustained contributions to computational complexity theory and providing an understanding of the limits of efficient solvability for a wide range of decision and optimization problems central to operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS).

As an example of a major contribution, Papadimitriou and Yannakakis introduced Max-NP and Max-SNP, natural variants of the NP complexity class, comprised of certain optimization problems that can be approximated with bounded error (Papadimitriou & Yannakakis1988). Within these classes, they showed that several common problems have polynomial-time approximation schemes only if the whole class does.

Other major contributions include establishing the NP-completeness of the Euclidean traveling salesman problem (Papadimitriou 1977), an early tour de force in the traditional framework, and characterizing the complexity of many other natural problems. Examples include: checking the validity of facets of polytopes (Papadimitriou and Yannakakis 1984); determining whether a problem has a unique optimal solution (Papadimitriou 1984); local search (Johnson, Papadimitriou and Yannakakis 1988); the extension complexity of LP formulations for the matching and traveling salesman problems (Yannakakis 1988), a paper that erected a firewall to scores of would-be P=NP proofs; and computing Nash equilibria. In the online setting, their work on finding online solutions with a bounded competitive ratio (Papadimitriou and Yannakakis 1991, 1993) has been highly influential. Finally, the introduction of the concept of the “price of anarchy” (Koutsoupias & Papadimitriou 1999, Yannakakis 2009) was a catalyst for major developments in algorithmic game theory, substantially reinforcing the links between economics, computer science, and operations research.

Such contributions have addressed modeling and computational issues at the core of multiple areas in OR/MS; they have helped characterize what is possible and inherently impossible, and more broadly, have provided new tools for such characterizations. Their work has resolved fundamental open problems and sparked new and fruitful lines of research, leading to a better understanding of the field of optimization at large.