Prof. Vahideh Manshadi Featured in List of Landmark Papers in ‘Mathematics of Operations Research’
In honor of the journal’s 50th anniversary, editors curated a list of influential papers from each year of its history. For 2012, they selected a study by Manshadi that introduced an algorithm for helping online platforms make real-time decisions at scale.
A 2012 paper by Vahideh Manshadi, the Michael H. Jordan Professor of Operations, is among 50 selected to represent the history of the journal in which it was published, Mathematics of Operations Research.
Published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, the quarterly peer-reviewed journal features mathematical contributions to operations research, management science, game theory, and optimization. The 50 selected papers reflect the field’s evolution over five decades.
Manshadi co-authored the paper, “Online Stochastic Matching: Online Actions Based on Offline Statistics,” with Shayan Oveis Gharan and Amin Saberi. The paper examines a key difficulty in real-time decision-making: large online platforms handle billions of interactions each day and must make immediate decisions, such as which advertisement to display, without knowing which users will arrive next. To address this, the authors developed an algorithm that uses historical arrival patterns to build an offline strategy that guides real-time decisions. Many studies focusing on similar challenges have since adopted Manshadi’s approach.
Manshadi is the research director for operations research at the Center for Algorithms, Data, and Market Design at Yale. She also serves as an associate editor for the publications Management Science and Operations Research. Her research focuses on the operation of online and matching platforms, particularly those with societal impact, including volunteer crowdsourcing, refugee resettlement, organ allocation, and information platforms.
