SDS Dean Jim Dai Awarded 2024 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize
Professor Jim Dai, Dean of the School of Data Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen), has been awarded the 2024 John von Neumann Theory Prize at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, USA. The prize recognizes his fundamental and sustained contributions to stochastic systems theory, particularly his seminal work on stochastic network stability and heavy traffic diffusion approximations.
The John von Neumann Theory Prize, the highest honour in operations research and management science, celebrates scholars who have made foundational and sustained contributions to the field.
Professor Jim Dai (centre) with INFORMS President Julie Swann (left) and INFORMS Executive Director Elena Gerstmann (right) at the award ceremony
At the award ceremony, Professor Julie Swann, the 2024 INFORMS President, and Professor John Tsitsiklis, Prize Committee Chair, highlighted Professor Dai's distinctive approach: "His work is motivated by models that arise in manufacturing and networking, which he connects to paradigmatic mathematical problems. His work is distinguished by intellectual taste, mathematical depth, and profound originality. Additionally, he has been a leading educator and mentor with a very strong record of service to the profession".
Professor Dai's award particularly recognizes his seminal 1995 paper, "On positive Harris recurrence of multiclass queueing networks: A unified approach via fluid limit models". This groundbreaking work established a pioneering connection between fluid model stability and the positive recurrence of general state-space Markov processes, such as those describing queueing networks. In this pivotal contribution, he demonstrated that under very general conditions, the stability of a deterministic fluid model implies the stability of the stochastic process model. This approach has since become a cornerstone in the field of stochastic networks and has laid the foundation for numerous subsequent developments by both Dai and others.
Beyond fluid analysis, Professor Dai has made substantial contributions to the broader field of stochastic networks. His achievements include developing heavy traffic diffusion approximations for multiclass service stations with Markovian feedback, producing a notable counterexample about the (non)existence of diffusion approximations (in collaboration with Wang), and introducing new methodologies for obtaining quantitative bounds for diffusion approximations based on Stein's method. He has also advanced the scope and asymptotic optimality of max-weight scheduling, among other significant contributions to the field.
Professor Jim Dai
Professor Jim Dai is the Leon C. Welch Professor of Engineering in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Cornell University. He is also the Dean of School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Prior joining Cornell in 2012, Professor Dai held the Chandler Family Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a faculty member from 1990 to 2012, and received the title of Edenfield Professor in 2007. He was a Special Term Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University from 2002 to July 2018, and James Riley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore from 2009 to 2011.
Professor Dai has received a number of awards for his research contributions. He was honored with the 1994 Young Investigator Award (formerly the Presidential Young Scientist Award) and the 1998 Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society for his outstanding academic achievement. In 1997 and 2017, Professor Dai was awarded the Best Paper Award by the INFORMS Applied Probability Society. In 2018, Professor Dai received the 2018 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award. Professor Dai served as the Editor-In-Chief for Mathematics of Operations Research (MOR), the leading academic journal in operations research, from 2012 to 2019.
John von Neumann Theory Prize
The John von Neumann Theory Prize stands as the highest honour in operations research and management science, recognising scholars who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the field. Established in 1975, the prize is awarded annually at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, celebrating work that demonstrates enduring academic impact through its significance, innovation, depth, and scientific excellence over many years.
