The 2004 Computing Society Prize of the Institute for Operations and
the Management Sciences (INFORMS) has been awarded jointly to CS
affiliate professor
Nick Sahinidis, and his former student Mohit Tawarmalani,
Assistant Professor at the Krannert Graduate School of Management at
Purdue University.
The INFORMS Computing Society Prize is awarded annually for research
excellence at the interface between operations research and computer
science. The 2004 prize was awarded to Sahinidis and Tawarmalani for
“their contributions to the field of nonlinear global optimization
summarized in their book Convexification and Global Optimization in
Continuous and Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming, and embodied in
the BARON software package.”
BARON has been under development by Professor Sahinidis’ group since
1991 and has enabled scientists and engineers to study problems in
fields ranging from computational chemistry to energy policy. The
award citation commends the Sahinidis-Tawarmalani work that “unites
a number of traditionally separate research areas in creating an
enabling technology for new application fields… Work of this nature
opens up new applications for the future of mathematical
programming.”
Sahinidis, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has
been developing optimization algorithms to solve important problems
in many diverse areas, including X-ray crystallographic computing,
molecular design, and computational biology.
INFORMS has about 11,000 members that come primarily from
engineering, management, mathematics, economics, and computer
science. Their focal point is the development of information
technology for informed decision-making. The INFORMS Computing
Society is one of the largest subdivisions of INFORMS, is concerned
with computer science and its relationship to operations research
and the management sciences, and oversees publication of the
INFORMS Journal on Computing. |
