Congrats to Tony Qin and members of AI Labs’ reinforcement team for winning the 2019 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice at this year’s INFORMS Conference.
After three rounds of judging (competition paper, oral presentation, final judges’ evaluation), the team’s entry (“Ride-hailing Order Dispatching on DiDi via Reinforcement Learning”) beat out four other finalists to earn the top prize.
The team’s competition paper (first authored by Tony Qin) featured DiDi’s deep reinforcement learning (DRL) research on dispatch optimization, and will be published in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (formerly Interfaces).
Papers are judged on high quality of writing; evidence of mathematical development, solution, unique new algorithm, or series of coherent advances developed in conjunction with an application; and evidence of success in practice.
Tony will give a reprise of the team’s work and participate at the formal ceremony at the INFORMS Analytics conference in Denver, CO in April 2020.
The additional finalists for the 2019 award were:
- Pricing Analytics for Rotable Spare Parts
- Omar Besbes, Adam Elmachtoub and Yunjie Sun, Columbia University
- London Heathrow Airport Uses Real-time Analytics for Improving Operations
- Xiaojia Guo and Bert De Reyck, University College London
- Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Harvard Business School
- Daily Tutor Scheduling Support at Hopeful Journeys Educational Center
- Matthew Bailey and Lucas Waddell, Bucknell University
- Empowering Denver Public Schools System to Optimize School Bus Operations
- Amanda Chu and Pinar Keskinocak, Georgia Institute of Technology and Denver Public Schools