DESCRIPTION
The Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research (SEIO)-BBVA Foundation Awards, bestowed annually at national level, recognize originality, innovation and contributions in Statistics and Operations Research, with the dual aim of encouraging research work in these two fields and its projection to society.
The 2022 edition laureates will collect their awards on January 18, 2023 at a ceremony that will also honor the winners of the 2022 SEIO Medals, whose goal is to recognize the work of SEIO members who have contributed signally to the advancement and standing of Statistics and Operations Research, nationally and internationally, as scientific disciplines.
2022 SEIO-BBVA Foundation Awards
Best methodological contribution in Statistics
José R. Berrendero (Associate Professor of Statistics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Antonio Cuevas (Professor of Statistics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and José L. Torrecilla (Assistant Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) for their paper “On the Use of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces in Functional Classification,” published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and described by the committee as “a novel contribution to statistical theory and methods.”
Best methodological contribution in Operations Research
Justo Puerto (Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Seville), Antonio M. Rodríguez-Chía (Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Cádiz) and Arie Tamir (Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Tel Aviv), for their paper “Revisiting K-sum Optimization,” published in Mathematical Programming. Their approach, said the committee, “allows researchers to obtain new algorithms and complexity results for a number of problems.”
Best applied contribution in Statistics
Verónica Álvarez (doctoral researcher at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics-BCAM), Santiago Mazuelas (Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow and Ikerbasque Research Fellow at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics-BCAM) and José Antonio Lozano (Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of the Basque Country and Scientific Director of the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics-BCAM), for “Probabilistic Load Forecasting Based on Adaptative Online Learning,” published in IEEE-Transactions on Power Systems. For the committee, “this paper provides a significant improvement in accurate and reliable forecasts of electricity load,” an issue, it adds, which is “becoming more important with climate change.”
Best applied contribution in Operations Research
Gilbert Laporte (Emeritus Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal), Marie-Ève Rancourt (Associate Professor in the Department of Logistics and Operations Management, HEC Montréal), Jessica Rodríguez-Pereira (postdoctoral research fellow at Pompeu Fabra University) and Selene Silvestri (Associate Partner, FICO), for their paper “Optimizing Access to Drinking Water in Remote Areas. Application to Nepal,” published in Computers & Operations Research. The committee described this applied contribution as being “motivated by a real world issue, namely a complex network design problem arising in the distribution of drinking water in remote mountainous areas.”
Best contribution in Statistics and Operations Research applied to Data Science and Big Data
Virgilio Gómez Rubio (Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Castilla-La Mancha), for his book Bayesian Inference with INLA, described by the committee as “a complete introduction, both theoretical and practical, to this method,” which “includes applications to a wide variety of statistical models.”
2022 SEIO Medals
Ricardo Cao Abad (Professor of Statistics and Operations Research, University of La Coruña), for outstanding contributions in multiple areas of statistics including nonparametric methods, resampling methods, empirical likelihood, survival analysis, functional data analysis and statistical analysis of large data sets, and their applications to genomics, neurosciences, epidemiology, oncology, etc. for which he has received widespread international recognition.
Ángel Corberán Salvador (Professor of Statistics and Operations Research, retired, University of Valencia), for his pioneering career in operations research in Spain, focused on combinatorial optimization and network design problems, with particular attention to vehicle routing problems, a field in which he is a world authority, contributing through his efforts to the scientific advancement and international standing of operations research.
