FBIT faculty member wins national operations research prize

Dr. Fletcher Lu, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Business and Information Technology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), recently won first place in the Canadian Operations Research Society’s (CORS) Practice Prize competition.

Founded in 1958, CORS is the national society for operations research (OR), a scientific discipline focused on improving operations in industry, public-sector and military organizations by developing optimization methods; planning under uncertainty; and solving complex large-scale problems efficiently.

The Practice Prize recognizes an outstanding application of operational research (OR) to the solution of applied problems. The main criteria for evaluating submissions include:

• Contribution to the practice of OR
• Degree of challenge
• Project impact on a client organization
• Quality of a written and oral presentation
• Quality of analysis

Dr. Lu’s project was entitled Computational Efficiencies in Insurance Fraud Data Analysis. He worked with Medavie Blue Cross, a health insurance provider, to improve the efficiency in the company’s existing search techniques and uncover new fraud patterns.