Olvi Mangasarian

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.

This prize is awarded annually for the best contribution (in a paper, book, or group of papers or books) to the field of operations research and the management sciences published in English. The work is recognized by this award was published in the papers:

• "Arbitrary-norm separating plane," Operations Research Letters 24, 1999, pp. 15-23.
• P. S. Bradley, U. M. Fayyad and O. L. Mangasarian, "Mathematical Programming for Data Mining: Formulation and Challenges," INFORMS Journal on Computing, 11, 1999, pp. 217-238.
• O. L. Mangasarian, "Generalized Support Vector Machines." In Advances in Large Margin Classifiers, Smola, Barlett, Scholkopf and Schurmans (eds), MIT Press, Boston, MA, 2000, pp. 135-146.

These body of work forms an important contribution to the field of data mining. It is a pioneering work in introducing the use of Operations Research techniques to this area. The practical of this work is manifested in the important application to breast cancer diagnosis.

Although the work described is timely in these days of internet, search engines, data warehousing and increasing need to identify meaningful patterns in large data bases, Olvi Mangasarian had the foresight to introduce the fundamental concepts and recognize the importance of this field as early as 1965. 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."

— Presented by: Dorit Hochbaum, Lanchester Prize Committee Chair