Assistant Professor Philipee Rigollet has been selected to receive the Howard B. Wentz Jr. Junior Faculty Award from the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). "Intended to recognize and assist promising junior faculty members," this award will help further Rigollet's research interests in nonparametric statistics, statistical learning theory, high dimensional statistics, bandit problems, aggregation, stochastic optimization, and dimension reduction.
Undergraduate and 2013 G(irls)20 Summit Delegate Carmina Mancenon ’14, a concentrator in operations research and financial engineering, is among nine students that have been named winners of the 2013 Spirit of Princeton Award. The Spirit of Princeton Award recognizes undergraduates who have "made positive contributions to various facets of the University".
Mancenon, vice president of the USG, part of the Pace Council for Civic Values, a dormitory assistant, and a member of the Naacho Indian Dance Company, is slated to represent Japan at this year's G(irls)20 Summit. The Summit brings together one girl, aged 18-20, from each G20 country. Delegates look at the agenda of the G20 Leaders to debate, discuss, and design ideas to improve communities around the globe by economically empowering girls and women, then present those ideas back to the G20 Leaders.
Graduate student Quentin Berthet and Assistant Professor Philippe Rigollet will receive the "best paper award" at this year's edition of the Conference On Learning Theory (COLT) for their paper "Complexity Theoretic Lower Bounds for Sparse Principal Component Detection". In this groundbreaking work, they show that employing computationally efficient statistical methods in the context of sparse principal component analysis leads to an ineluctable deterioration of statistical performance, regardless of the efficient method employed. In particular, their paper draw new connections between statistical learning and computational complexity. An extended version of the paper is available here.
For the full list of accepted papers, visit the COLT 2013 website.
Professor Jianqing Fan has won the inaugural Pao-Lu Hsu Prize, presented every three years by the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA). The award is conferred upon an individual under the age of 50 who has made influential and fundamental contributions to any field of statistics and probability, and who exemplifies Hsu's deep involvement in developing statistics and probability research with significant impact on education. The prize is open to all nationalities, while priority is given to candidates whose work contributes greatly to the research and education of Chinese statisticians. The award recipient will speak at an ICSA International Conference and includes $3000 cash prize. An official award ceremony with special presentations by the award recipients will be held at the ICSA International Conference in Hong Kong, December 20-23, 2013.
The official announcement can be found in the August 2012 issue of the ICSA Member Newsletter.
For more than 15 years, the OJ Game, also known as the Princeton Orange Bowl, has been challenging teams of students in ORF411: Operations and Information Engineering to create the best virtual orange juice business. The teams are tasked with coordinating the operational and financial logistics of their virtual business in a real time simulation, while Professor Warren Powell and a group of support faculty and graduate students monitor team progress and performance, introducing unanticipated dilemmas along the way. In the months leading up to the game, student teams formulate contingencies that will help them analyze and execute in response to the game’s challenges. The Office of Engineering Communications recently talked to students and instructors alike in this video and article highlighting the OJ Game.
Professor Erhan Çinlar and Professor Robert J. Vanderbei have co-authored a new textbook on analysis. Real and Convex Analysis, published by Springer, aims to provide an accessible introduction to real and convex analysis. It also lays the foundation for application of analytical tools in new fields such as optimization and probability theory. The book is written for an audience of advanced undergraduate and graduate engineers and scientists, leveraging detailed illustrations, examples, and exercises throughout.
© 2012 The Trustees of Princeton University • Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering • Princeton, NJ 08544
