Call for nominations - 2012-2013 Innovation in Analytics Award

The purpose of the Innovation in Analytics Award is to recognize creative and unique developments, applications or combinations of analytical techniques. The prize promotes the awareness of the value of analytics techniques in unusual applications or in creative combination to provide unique insights and/or business value. The prize is not meant to recognize strictly theoretical advances, though theoretical advances might be an enabler to innovative applications. Similarly, the prize is not focused on implementation value created, but such value creation might add credibility to the innovation.

Applicants can submit proposals in the descriptive, predictive or prescriptive areas of analytics. Descriptive innovation could include novel measures, visualization methods or creative approaches to the analytics process improvement among others. Predictive innovation might be statistical application, text analytics or simulation, among others. Prescriptive innovation might include, for example, game theory or optimization. The lists above are not meant to be exclusive, but rather illustrative examples of areas of innovation.

Judging criteria:

• The judging criteria will be based on the level of uniqueness, creativity, value and (potential) contribution of the analytical techniques developed. Submissions will be evaluated based on innovations in any of the three dimensions of analytics: descriptive, predictive or prescriptive. Submissions that span more than one dimension of analytics are preferred. Implemented approaches are required to demonstrate that applicability of the innovation; to the extent implemented savings are claimed in the submission, the judging panel will seek verification of the implementation. Submissions that have the potential for more widespread use will be given added consideration, but particularly clever innovations with narrow focus are also highly valued.

Applicants should submit a brief summary (approximately 500 to 1,000 words) of their work by July 15. Applicants may be queried by a subset of the committee to provide supplemental information, or to clarify, verify and validate their work via either written or oral questions. Finalist(s) will be selected based on their summary, presentation and response to judge's questions.

Semifinalists will be notified by July 31 and will be eligible to present at the INFORMS annual meeting in Phoenix (Oct. 15 or 16). Finalists will be selected by Nov. 30. Up to three finalists will present their work in a 50-minute session at the spring INFORMS Analytics Conference (April 7 or 8, 2013, San Antonio, Texas), where the winning submission will be announced.

The prize is intended to recognize recent or on-going work. The winner will receive $2,000, the runner-up will receive $1,000 and the third-place finisher will receive $500. Each finalist will receive one complementary registration to the INFORMS Analytics Conference in San Antonio in 2013. Finalist(s) are expected to present at the spring conference. Finalist(s) will be expected to write summaries

2012 winner is Booz Allen Hamilton for "Enhancing Immigration Enforcement with Decision Analytics." Booz Allen Hamilton innovatively applied traditional operations research techniques to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efficiently align its resources to remove criminal offenders. The consulting company’s implementation of analytics spanned three years and involved developing a set of models used to solve challenging problems such as forecasting the number of criminal illegal aliens, optimizing a technology deployment schedule and minimizing the transportation costs of removal. The impact of the work resulted in a doubling of criminal alien removals leading to greater public safety for the American people.