College of

Engineering, Architecture and Technology

Maral Shahmizad, a Ph.D. student in Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM), and Dr. Austin Buchanan, associate professor of IEM, received an Honorable Mention Poster Award for Maral’s poster presentation Political Districting to Minimize County Splits at the 24^th Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization (IPCO) Conference.

 

The IPCO Conference was held on June 21-23, 2023 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, WI and was organized by the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID). The IPCO conference is under the auspices of the Mathematical Optimization Society and is held every year, except for those in which the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming takes place. The conference is a forum for researchers and practitioners working on various aspects of integer programming and combinatorial optimization. The aim is to present recent developments in theory, computation, and applications in these areas.

 

Shahmizad and Buchanan’s poster, which is based on their joint paper, focuses on a fundamental problem in political districting. When partitioning a state into political districts, a common criterion is that political subdivisions like counties should not be split across multiple districts. This criterion is encoded into most state constitutions and is sometimes enforced quite strictly by the courts. However, map drawers, courts, and the public typically do not know what amount of splitting is truly necessary, even to satisfy basic criteria like contiguity and population balance.

 

In their work, they provide answers for all congressional, state senate, and state house districts in the USA using 2020 census data. Their approach is based on integer programming. The associated codes and experimental results are publicly available on GitHub.

 

Maral also presented this same work at the FutureBAProf workshop held at the University of Iowa.

 

Other awardees at the IPCO Conference were:
Best Poster Award went to Evangelia Gergatsouli for the poster Opening Pandora’s Box: the Correlated Case, joint work with Shuchi Chawla, Yifeng Teng, Christos Tzamos and Ruimin Zhang of University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Honorable Mention went to Anthony Karahalios for the poster Column Elimination for Large-Scale Integer Programming joint work with Willem-Jan van Hoeve of Carnegia Mellon University.