Computer scientist wins top professional award

Olvi Mangasarian, professor of computer sciences, received the prestigious 2000 Lanchester Prize for his influential work on computer pattern recognition and data mining.

The Lanchester Prize, run by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), recognizes a body of work that is deemed to be the most influential contribution to computer science in the past three years. He received the award at the INFORMS annual meeting this month in San Antonio.

Mangasarian, who has been a UW–Madison professor since 1967, has made fundamental contributions to the theory and application of mathematical programming. The award recognized his recent pioneering work in developing support vector machines as a tool for mining massive data sets.

“Undoubtedly, (his) work will remain at the center of operations research for years to come,” says UW–Madison computer scientist Michael Ferris, who nominated Mangasarian.

The Lanchester Prize has been awarded since 1954, and past winners include some of the top scientists in the field.