December 2000 INFORMS News Mangasarian's Pioneering Work in Data Mining Earns Lanchester Prize Olvi Mangasarian, a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received the Lanchester Prize from INFORMS for a series of papers that made important, pioneering contributions to the field of data mining. The Lanchester Prize is awarded annually for the best contribution, published in English, to the field of operations research and the management sciences. The contribution can be in the form of a single paper or book, or a group of papers or books. Prize Committee chair Dorit Hochbaum made the presentation. Mangasarian was cited for three specific papers: "Arbitrary-norm separating plane," published in Operations Research Letters in 1999; "Mathematical Programming for Data Mining: Formulation and Challenges," (with co-authors P.S. Bradley, U.M. Fayyad), published in the INFORMS Journal on Computing in 1999; and "Generalized Support Vector Machines" in "Advances in Large Margin Classifiers," MIT Press, published in 2000. Although Mangasarian's work is particularly timely in an era of the Internet, search engines, data warehousing and increasing needs to identify meaningful patterns in large databases, Hochbaum said that "Olvi Mangasarian had the foresight to introduce the fundamental concepts and recognize the importance of this field as early as 1965." Hochbaum further noted that Mangasarian's pioneering work in introducing the practical use of operations research techniques in data mining is "manifested in the important application to breast cancer diagnosis, which is still in use today at the University of Wisconsin Hospital." Saying he was "deeply honored" by the award, Mangasarian recognized the many colleagues who helped him in his career, both technically and otherwise. "I am particularly grateful for my Ph.D. students," he said, "from whom I learned as much as I think they learned from me." Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 2000 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 2000 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.