Undergrad Operations Research Redistricting Prize
Announcing…the 2023-2024 Undergraduate Operations Research Redistricting Prize!
The competition is open to undergraduate students at U.S. universities who are taking a course in Operations Research (OR). One motivation for the competition is to excite students about the field of OR. To encourage students to participate in the competition, a member of the top-performing team will receive $1,000 in travel support to attend the 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA and compete for the INFORMS Undergraduate OR Prize.
Timeline:
- August 2023-May 2024. Instructors of undergrad OR courses in fall 2023 or spring 2024 are invited to use redistricting as a course project. Pre-register your class by sending an email to buchanan@okstate.edu. Registrants will receive districting-related course materials (e.g., project descriptions, grading rubrics, homework questions, class activities, data files).
- May 31, 2024. Deadline for instructors to nominate one team by submitting the team’s project documents to buchanan@okstate.edu.
- June 1-15, 2024. Judges will have two weeks to score the submissions and select a winner.
- June 16, 2024. The winner will be notified, giving them two weeks to finalize their submission for the INFORMS Undergraduate OR Prize (whose deadline is usually June 30th).
- October 20-23, 2024. INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA.
Helpful Resources:
- A collection of OR Redistricting Resources
- A GitHub repo with example districting codes
- A survey on optimization methods for political districting
- Instructors can email buchanan@okstate.edu to request course materials (e.g., project descriptions, grading rubrics, homework questions, class activities, data files)
Organizer:
- Austin Buchanan, Oklahoma State University
Judges:
- Kiera Dobbs, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Adolfo Escobedo, North Carolina State University
- Soraya Ezazipour, Oklahoma State University
- Cyrus Hettle, Georgia Tech
- Robert Hildebrand, Virginia Tech
- Ian Ludden, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
- Brendan Ruskey, Lehigh University
- Maral Shahmizad, Oklahoma State University
- Hamidreza Validi, Texas Tech University
- Jose L. Walteros, University at Buffalo