COIN-OR Cup 2016 Winners Announced

The 2016 COIN-OR Cup is awarded to Giacomo Nannicini (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center) and Thomas Wortmann (Singapore University of Technology and Design) for their contributions to model-based optimization for architectural design. The twelfth annual cup was awarded based on the RBFOpt and Opossum packages developed by the awardees.

RBFOpt has been in COIN-OR since 2015 and is a python library for blackbox global optimization in settings where the objective function is computationally expensive to evaluate. Opossum is a plugin for Grasshopper — a generative design language popular among architectural designers — that provides a GUI to RBFOpt.

This year’s committee commended the awardees for their simultaneous valuable contribution to COIN-OR and effective use of COIN-OR software. By lowering the barrier to entry, RBFOpt and Opossum are bringing state-of-the-art optimization to new communities and exciting classes of problems.

This year’s Cup was awarded at a celebration at the Flying Saucer in Nashville, Tennessee, during the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

2016 COIN-OR Cup Committee:

• Joey Huchette, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Jeffrey Linderoth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Miles Lubin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Stefan Wild (chair), Argonne National Laboratory