David Karger (A.B. Summa cum laude in Computer Science, 1989,
Harvard University, Ph.D., 1994, in Computer Science, Stanford
University) is a Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of
Computer Science and a member of the Laboratory for Computer
Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His research interests include algorithms and information retrieval.
Professor Karger's work in algorithms has focused on applications
of randomization to network optimization problems.
His dissertation on the topic was awarded the ACM 1994 Doctoral
Dissertation Award and the 1997 Tucker Prize.
He has published more than 30 technical articles
and two book chapters and has served on program committees
for the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
and the Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science.
He recently participated in the founding of Akamai technologies,
a company that grew out of a research project he co-led.
Professor Karger's work on information retrieval includes
the co-development of the Scatter/Gather information retrieval system
at Xerox PARC, which suggested several novel approaches
for efficiently retrieving information from massive corpora
and presenting it effectively to users.
He has received two patents related to his work on this project.
Sheldon M. Ross is a professor in the Department
of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University
of California at Berkeley.
He received his Ph.D in statistics at Stanford University in 1968
and has been at Berkeley ever since.
He has published nearly 100 technical articles and a variety
of textbooks in the areas of applied probability and statistics.
He is the founding and continuing editor of the journal
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Scienes
published by Cambridge University Press.
In addition, a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics,
and a recipient of the Humboldt US Senior Scientist award.
Suvrajeet Sen is Professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering
at the University of Arizona.
He has been with the University since 1982, the year he graduated
from Virginia Tech with a Ph.D. in Operations Research.
Professor Sen has been involved in both undergraduate and graduate
teaching, as well as research and professional service.
One of the highlights of his involvement with undergraduate
programs is his participation in the ELITE program.
This program is targeted at talent undergraduate students
who wish to combine a liberal arts orientation within
an engineering curriculum.
Professor Sen's research is devoted to the theory and applications
of large scale optimization algorithms, especially those arising
in stochastic programming.
He has also applied these methods to practical problems arising
in airlines, electric power, mining, telecommunications
and transportation.
He has authored or coauthored over fifty publications,
many of which have appeared in journals like JOTA,
Mathematical Programming, Mathematics of Operations Research,
Management Science and Operations Research.
He has also coauthored a research monograph on Stochastic Decomposition.
His research has been funded by federal agencies as well as industry.
He has been an invited lecturer at numerous universities,
both in the United States and overseas.
Professor Sen serves on the editorial board of several journals,
the most prominent of which is his service as the Optimization Editor
for Operations Research.
He is also an Associate Editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing
and Telecommunications Systems.
He has served as guest editor for Interfaces and Annals
of Operations Research.
Professor Sen is the past-Chair of the INFORMS Telecommunications
Section and also founded the INFORMS Optimization Section.
Robert J. Vanderbei received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics
from Cornell University in 1981.
His current research interests are interior-point methods
for nonlinear programming and for semidefinite programming,
and application of optimization techniques to problems arising
in engineering.
He is associate editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing,
and author of the book "Linear Programming, Foundations and Extensions"
(Kluwer, 1997).
Richard Weber has been a student and faculty member
at the University of Cambridge since 1971.
For fifteen years he taught in the Management Group
of the Department of Engineering.
For the past five years has been Churchill Professor of Mathematics
for Operational Research in the Department of Mathematics.
His research interests include communications, operations management,
control of queues, stochastic networks, on-line bin-packing
and scheduling, optimal search, stochastic scheduling,
dynamic resource allocation, and pricing communications services.
Laurence Wolsey works at CORE (Center for Operations Research and
Econometrics) and is professor of applied mathematics and operations
research in the Engineering School of l'Universite Catholique
de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
His main field of research is mixed integer programming,
including theory, the development of branch-and-cut systems,
and applications in network design and in production planning
and scheduling.
He is author of a recent textbook "Integer Programming" (Wiley, 1998),
as well as joint author with George Nemhauser of
"Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization" (Wiley, 1988).
He has worked closely with groups at BASF (production planning),
France Telecom (multiplexer assignment)and DASH (commercial mixed
integer programming systems) among others.
He has received the Orchard-Hays prize in 1988 from the Mathematical
Programming Society (with T.J. Van Roy), the Lanchester Prize in 1989
from the Operations Research Society of America (with G.L. Nemhauser),
and the EURO Gold Medal in 1994.
He has just been appointed editor-in-chief of the Mathematical
Programming journal.
