Category: News

Winners of the Inaugural John Andrew George Memorial Prize

At the 2017 ORSNZ the first John Andrew George Memorial Prizes were awarded. This prize was established by Grant Read, Vicky Mabin, Bob Cavana, and John Buchanan in memory of former ORSNZ Vice President John George, who passed away in November last year.

While most OR projects are expected to deliver “benefits” of various kinds, the emphasis here is not on purely economic, or even purely environmental, benefits, but on efforts to better the lives of others.  It is thus about the motivation, heart and soul of the project.  So the key consideration was be the following question:

“How will this work contribute to improving the quality of people’s lives, particularly those who may otherwise be vulnerable or disadvantaged, now, or in future?”

This prize was open to all papers presented for the YPP, and was awarded jointly to:

Samuel Ridler – Ambulance simulation and optimisation; and
Samin Aref – Computing the frustration index in signed graphs using binary programming.

Left to right: Samuel Riddler (JAG Award Winner), Grant Read, Vicky Mabin, Bob Cavana (judges), and Michael O’Sullivan (ORSNZ President).

ORSNZ Hans Daellenbach Prize awarded to Prof. Vicky Mabin

At the 2017 ORSNZ Conference Prof. Vicky Mabin was awarded the Hans Daellenbach Prize. Part of the citation is given below:

We have great pleasure in announcing that Professor Victoria Jane Mabin, from Victoria University of Wellington, has been awarded the ORSNZ Hans Daellenbach Award for outstanding contributions to Operational Research in New Zealand. This award is made particularly for “Applied OR”, and Professor Mabin has been active not only as an academic but, along with her students, in a variety of applied contexts, for over 30 years. She has also been an active contributor to the OR Society, of which she is a Past President.

You can find the full citation, along with her CV on the ORSNZ Prizes page.

From left to right: Prof. Vicky Mabin, Prof. Grant Read, Dr Michael J O’Sullivan, and Bob Cavana.

 

Young Practitioner’s Prize Winners 2017

At the 51st ORSNZ Conference held in December 2017, we had 14 entries into the Young Practitioner’s Prize, which was sponsored by Trustpower. There were three prizes awarded:

  • 1st Place: Oscar Dowson – SDDP.jl: a Julia package for Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming
  • 2nd Place: Thomas Adams – Balancing Physician Workloads Under Uncertain Admissions
  • 3rd Place: Isaac Cleland – Solving a Generalised Staff Rostering Problem

Dr Michael J O’Sullivan (ORSNZ President) and Mr Danny Tsai (Trustpower) present YPP certificates to Oscar Dowson (left), Thomas Adams (middle), and Isaac Cleland (right)

In memoriam: John Andrew George (30-11-1945 – 1-11-2017)

Dr John George unexpectedly passed away last Wednesday (November 1). John was a former vice-president of the Operations Research Society of New Zealand, and Editor of the Newsletter.

Here are a selection of newsletters where John contributed editorials: September 1998; March 1999; December 1999.

His memorial service will be held at 2pm on November 6. You can view the service live here. For the next three months, you can watch a recording of the service here. Log in using the Event ID westparkchapel, and Password ESZFRF.

We would like to recognise John’s contribution to OR in New Zealand at the upcoming conference, so if you have any memories of John George which you would like to share, please email [email protected].

Postgraduate scholarships at UOA

Three postgraduate scholarships are currently available at the University of Auckland. Click on the links below for more information.

 

2017 INFORMS Fellows Named

Andy Philpott (Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland; ORSNZ council member) and Shane Henderson, (Cornell University, formerly at Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland) have been named as 2017 INFORMS Fellows for their outstanding contributions in the field of OR.

For further information about the 2017 INFORMS Fellows see  this link

 

Dr James Tipping announced Young Energy Professional of the Year

Dr James Tipping, Manager of Strategy and Regulation, Trustpower, was announced the Young Energy Professional of the Year at the 2017 Deloitte Energy Excellence Awards on 9 August 2017. James is a member of ORSNZ and completed his PhD at the University of Canterbury, supervised by Grant Read, Don McNickle and Deb Chattopadhyay.

For further details: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1708/S00369/james-tipping-named-young-energy-professional-of-the-year.htm

 

2016 Young Practitioner Prize Winners

At the 2016 Joint NZSA+ORSNZ Conference we had 7 high-quality papers submitted for the YPP, sponsored by Orbit Systems. Three prizes were awarded:

  • First-place: Ryan Cory-Wright, University of Auckland. Cost-recovering, revenue-adequate single settlement schemes for electricity markets.
  • Highly commended: Melissa Welsh, Victoria University of Wellington. Modelling traceability in the dairy industry.
  • Highly commended: Danielle Gatland, University of Auckland. Mapping electric vehicle range.
YPP Winners with Prof. Andy Philpott. From right: Melissa Welsh, Ryan Cory-Wright, and Danielle Gatland. Credit: Howard Henderson.

Copies of their papers can be found on the proceedings page of the conference website, here.