Optimal Learning for Drug Discovery in Ewing's Sarcoma claims Honors
Diana Negoescu '09 and Peter Frazier *09 have received honorable mention in the first 'Doing Good with Good OR' competition sponsored by Informs. The competition recognizes students or student groups whose projects are likely to have a significant impact on society through the application of operations research methods. Their project addressed the problem of sequencing the testing of different compounds in the search for drugs to effectively treat Ewing's Sarcoma. See the Doing Good with Good OR page for more information about the student competition, or the announcement, slide presentation and related readings on the research group's page.
Pupils Go Paperless in ORF405
"84 students in ORF 405: Regression & Applied Time Series are trying to do away with paper entirely. … professor Rene Carmona, who teaches ORF 405, has eliminated the use of paper in his course by assigning problem sets on the computer and having students submit them through Blackboard. Graders give feedback on the homework by writing on electronic tablets that are linked to the computer."
Carmona Calculates a Cooler Planet
"In recent months, [Prof. René] Carmona, the Paul Wythes '55 Professor of Engineering and Finance, has leveraged his expertise in the mathematical modeling of financial markets and other complex systems to develop models to guide cap-and-trade policies intended to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
'It's a very politically charged issue,' said Carmona, who also is a professor of operations research and financial engineering. 'My intention is to demystify cap-and-trade and at the same time understand its weaknesses and loopholes. There have been mistakes in the past, yet our research shows that a cap-and-trade system can work. But only if you do it right.'"
CASTLE Laboratory receives the 2009 Daniel H. Wagner Prize presented at INFORMS 2009.
Hugo Simao and Warren Powell were recipients of the 2009 Wagner Prize awarded by Informs for applications which make a methodological contribution. Their work addressed the problem of modeling the fleet operations of Schneider National, one of the largest truckload motor carriers in the U.S. The work developed algorithms for solving infinite-dimensional stochastic, dynamic programs. The resulting model was shown to accurately replicate the collective intelligence of a team of dispatchers, making it possible for Schneider to study the impact of changes in policies. See www.castlelab.princeton.edu/wagner.htm for more information
ORFE Major Evans Xiang '10 awarded the George B. Wood Legacy Junior Prize
At Opening Exercises on September 13th, 2009, Yu (Evans) Xiang '10 was announced as a co-recipient of
the university's George B. Wood Legacy Junior Prize, which is given to a member of the senior class in recognition of exceptional academic achievement during the junior year. Evans' research interests are in probability theory and statistics, especially theory of stochastic processes, robust parameter estimation and their applications to economics and finance. In his junior year, he did independent work on an optimal stopping problem involving nonhomogeneous Poisson processes. For his senior thesis, he plans to study stochastic volatility models and their applications to options pricing and hedging.
The full story is here
Junior Wins $100,000 Grant for Diabetic iPhone App
"[Matthew] Connor, a rising Princeton junior majoring in operations research and financial engineering, worked with his brother Michael, a 2007 graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, to develop an iPhone application to help diabetics manage their disease.
Now, Connor has been awarded a $100,000 grant to expand their initial application into a Web-based tool to help diabetics stay healthy, and make it easier for doctors to monitor diabetic patients and for researchers to study treatments for the disease."
Read more, News at Princeton
Ramon van Handel receives the 2009 SIAG/CST Best SICON Paper Prize
Ramon van Handel, a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer with the department's Research Training Group (RTG) in Stochastic Analysis & Applications, and an Assistant Professor in ORFE from September 1, 2009, will be awarded the 2009 SIAG/CST Best SICON Paper Prize at the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications (CT09), to be held July 6-8, jointly with the SIAM Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado. This will be the first award of the SIAG/CST Best SICON Paper Prize, which was established in 2007.
Rene Carmona, Paul Wythes '55 Professor of Engineering and Finance selected as Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
The SIAM Fellowship honors members who have made outstanding contributions to the fields served by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. http://www.siam.org/.
Jianqing Fan, Frederick l. Moore Class of 1918 Professor in Finance recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship Award
Jianqing Fan, Frederick l. Moore Class of 1918 Professor in Finance, is a 2009 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship Award. His project tile is "Feature selection and statistical learning in ultrahigh dimensional space". http://orfe.princeton.edu/~jqfan/
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. This year, six Princeton faculty members are receiving this award out of 180 total. Among these one is from Engineering, one from science and four from social science and humanities.
Dedication of Sherrerd Hall, April 4, 2009
Sherrerd hall was dedicated on April 4 in honor of the late John J.F. (Jay) Sherrerd '52, one of Princeton's most active and devoted alumni. Mr. Sherrerd studied economics at Princeton and earned an MBA from the Wharton