February 1996 € Volume 23 € No. 1

People

INFORMS Decision Analysis Awards
The INFORMS Section on Decision Analysis issued the following three awards at the Section's business meeting last fall in New Orleans:

James E. Matheson was presented the Frank P. Ramsey Medal -- the highest award of the Section on Decision Analysis. It was created to recognize substantial and distinguished contributions to the field of decision analysis. Matheson is a founder and director of Strategic Decisions Group (a decision analysis consulting firm based in Menlo Park, Calif.) and a leading figure in developing professional decision analysis. He has supervised hundreds of decision analysis applications in such areas as corporate strategy, capital investment, research and development, environmental safety, contract bidding, space exploration and public investment. He created the SRI International Decision Analysis Group and directed it for 14 years before forming Strategic Decisions Group in 1981. He is responsible for many innovations in methodology that have made decision analysis a powerful tool throughout many fields and industries. In 1967, he was appointed to the consulting faculty of Stanford University, where he is currently consulting professor in the Engineering-Economic Systems Department.

James E. Smith received the Decision Analysis Publication Award for his article, "Moment Methods in Decision Analysis," which appeared in Management Science, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1993). Smith is currently an associate professor at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

G. Mark Brown received the Student Paper Award for his paper, "Evaluation of Vision Correction Alternatives for Myopic Adults." The paper is an outgrowth of Brown's master's thesis in the Master of Science in Systems Management (MSSM) program at University of Southern California. Brown graduated from that program in May of 1995 and is currently a Member of the Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

INFORMS Transportation Science Awards
Bernard Gendron of the Université de Montréal has been awarded the 1995 INFORMS Transportation Science Section Dissertation Award. He received the award for his dissertation "New Methods for Solving Network Design Problems and their Parallel Implementations."

An honorable mention was awarded to Xu Jun Eberlein of MIT for "RealTime Control Strategies in Transit Operations: Models and Analysis."

Harald Niederreiter of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been awarded the 1995 Simulation Publication Award. He received the award for his book "Random Number Generation and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods," published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Thomas Magnanti of MIT presented a plenary session at the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) Specialized Conference on OR and Engineering Design, held Oct. 24-27, 1995, in St. Louis, Mo. The conference was attended by more than 100 participants from 19 countries on five continents.

Carl M. Harris, chairman of Operations Research at George Mason University, and former president of ORSA, has been awarded the University's BDM International Chair in Information Technology.

Jaap Ponstein, professor of operations research in the Department of Econometrics at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, died on Nov. 22, 1995.

E-mail to the Editorial Department of OR/MS Today: orms@lionhrtpub.com

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