Graduate student wins first prize in IBM international contest

Yan Xu, a Ph.D. candidate in industrial engineering, recently received first prize in an international competition sponsored by IBM Research to encourage open-source software for operation research.

Xu, who is advised by Ted Ralphs, the P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor of industrial and systems engineering, received an IBM R32 ThinkPad for winning the COIN-OR Open-Source Coding Contest.

The COIN-OR initiative was launched in 2000 with the long-term goal of building a resource for OR software that is analogous to the open literature for theory.

In competing for the prize, Xu submitted a computer program designed to improve existing programs that solve optimization problems in integer programming.

Ralphs and Jeff Linderoth, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, served as Xu's mentor in the project.

Prizes for the competition were awarded in August at the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP 2003) at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen.