Student Spotlight: Feng Ye Wins Best Student Paper Award at INFORMS Annual Meeting

October 28, 2022

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals. The 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting was held in Indianapolis, IN, from October 16-19.

Feng Ye, a graduate fellow in the NJ Wind Institute Fellowship Program at Rutgers, attended the conference to present his research under faculty advisor Dr. Ahmed Aziz Ezzat. Feng's work won him first place in the Best Student Paper Competition in the Sustainability: Science, Engineering, and Analytics category.

Feng presented a spatiotemporal data science model, called the AI-powered Rutgers University Weather Research and Forecasting (AIRU-WRF) model, which integrates physics-based numerical weather predictions with high-resolution measurements, in order to make turbine-specific, short-term wind forecasts. In contrast to black-box machine learning or purely physics-based methods, AIRU-WRF is a “physics-guided” statistical approach, i.e., it is designed to capture salient physical features of the offshore wind field, without the need to explicitly solve for those physics. Tested on actual measurements from the New York/New Jersey Bight—in vicinity to at least three ongoing offshore wind project developments—the forecasts made via AIRU-WRF are shown to significantly outperform prevalent benchmarks in the forecasting literature and practice.

Congratulations Feng!