Vivek F. Farias

Vivek Farias (Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor and Professor of Operations Management), along with several students in his research group and a team at Anheuser-Busch InBev, has received the 2022 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). This award recognizes the successful use of operations research, analytics, and innovative mathematics in practice.

Farias' winning paper, “Generalized Synthetic Control for TestOps at ABI: Models, Algorithms, and Infrastructure,” was co-authored with MIT students Tianyi Peng, Luis Costa, Patricio Foncea, and Jingyuan (Donna) Gan; and from Anheuser-Busch InBev, Ivo Rosa Montenegro, Ayush Garg, Dusan Popovic, and Kumarjit Pathak.

More information about their work that “results in millions in monthly revenue” with its “profound applications of analytics and O.R. to understand experimental power relative to alternatives using physical retail experiments and the platform, ‘TestOps’,” is in the prize announcement.

The award was presented in October during the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, IN. 

Vivek Farias has won the 2020 INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Young Scholar Prize. The prize is an early career  award that "recognizes exceptional young researchers who have made outstanding contributions to scholarship in operations management." Scholars of age 40 years or younger on January 31 of the year in which they are nominated are eligible for this award.

Vivek Farias has won a 2020 Teaching with Digital Technology Award from MIT for his work teaching on campus and/or remotely. Farias won the award along with fellow Sloan faculty members Kara Blackburn, Michelle Hanlon, Alexandre Jacquillat, Miro Kazakoff, Ben Shields, and Rodrigo Verdi. These student-nominated awards recognize faculty and instructors who have used digital technology to improve teaching and learning for MIT students. This recognition also gives the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their innovative practices. The awards were co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year, students submitted a total of 487 nominations for 232 faculty and instructors, and 30 winners were selected by Dean of Digital Learning Krishna Rajagopal and Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz, with help from MIT Open Learning staff. 

Vivek Farias and Eric So (Accounting) were each awarded the 2020 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor educational innovation and excellence. The Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching Award is the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the school. The award was established in 2006 and is awarded each year to two MIT Sloan faculty members, as well as two electrical engineering and computer science faculty members, for their contributions to educational excellence at MIT. The Jamieson faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.

Vivek F. Farias’ paper, Primal-Dual Algorithms for Order Fulfillment at Urban Outfitters, Inc., was a Finalist for the INFORMS 2018 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. Farias’ co-authors were J.M. Andrews, A.I. Khojandi, and C.M. Yan. The Wagner Prize was established in 1998 to commemorate the life and work of Dr. Daniel H. Wagner. 

Vivek Farias has received the 2016  Best OM Paper in Management Science Award from the MSOM (Manufacturing and Service Operations Management) Society of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). Vivek was honored for his 2013 paper (co-authored with Srikanth Jagabathula of NYU Stern and Devavrat Shah of MIT EECS) entitled, “A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Choice with Limited Data.”

Vivek Farias has won the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Revenue Management and Pricing section prize, which recognizes the “best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English.” Farias was honored for his 2013 Management Science paper (co-authored with Srikanth Jagabathula of NYU Stern and Devavrat Shah of MIT EECS), “A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Choice with Limited Data.”

Vivek Farias and Tavneet Suri have each received approval from the MIT Research Support Committee for $50,000 of funding from the Solomon Buchsbaum Research Fund. This fund's purpose is "to launch new research initiatives that cut across disciplinary lines" in "support of innovative ideas advanced primarily by young faculty."