[UPDATED JULY 22] Viterbi School Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) work on the security systems in place at LAX and by the Federal Air Marshals service was one of six finalists for the EURO excellence in practice award for excellence in practice in operations research.

From left, Back: Milind Tambe, Chris Kiekintveld. front: James Pita, Manish Jain. Not pictured: Jason Tsai, Fernando Ordoñez.

The 2010 EURO conference took place July 11-14 in Lisbon, Portugal, under the auspices of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies.

CS research assistant and Ph.D. students James Pita, Jason Tsai and Manish Jain, post-doctor researcher Chris Kiekintveld with CS professor Milind Tambe and ISE Fernando Ordoñez submitted their work on the IRIS and GUARDS system to the prestigious competition.

CREATE funded part of the projects and the center's former Associate  Erroll Southers attended the Lisbon conference.

Their submission included a research paper entitled "Software Assistants for Randomized Patrol Planning for The LAX Airport Police and The Federal Air Marshals Service," scheduled to appear in the research journal Interfaces, which reads in part:

"We describe two deployed applications that assist security forces in randomizing their operations based on fast algorithms for solving large instances of Bayesian Stackelberg games. The first is the ARMOR system (Assistant for Randomized Monitoring over Routes), which has been successfully deployed since August 2007 at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). This system is used by airport police to randomize the placement of checkpoints on roads entering the airport, and the routes of canine unit patrols in the airport terminals. The IRIS system (Intelligent Randomization in Scheduling) is designed to randomize flight schedules for the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS). IRIS has been deployed in a pilot program by FAMS since October 2009 to randomize schedules of air marshals on international flights."  (see complete text at http://teamcore.usc.edu/papers/2010/09Interfaces.pdf )

The submission also included letters of appreciation from users.