Richard Larson Receives Daniel Berg Lifetime Achievement Medal

Richard Larson, the Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a faculty member at IDSS, has received the first-ever Daniel Berg Lifetime Achievement Medal from the International Academy of Information Technology and Quantitative Management (IAITQM). The medal was presented at the IAITQM conference in New Delhi, on December 9. The award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to technology innovation, service systems and strategic decision-making.

The majority of Prof. Richard Larson’s career has focused on operations research as applied to services industries. He is author, co-author or editor of six books and author of over 75 scientific articles, primarily in the fields of technology-enabled education, urban service systems (esp. emergency response systems), queueing, logistics and workforce planning.

Dr. Larson is inventor of the Hypercube Queueing Model — for deploying urban emergency services — and the Queue Inference Engine, using ’big data’ to determine the performance of technology-enabled queues such as automatic teller machines. Known as “Dr. Queue”, Dr. Larson has appeared extensively in national and international media. He is a Founding Fellow of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), past president of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), past president of INFORMS, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Dr. Larson is principal investigator of the MIT BLOSSOMS Initiative, which offers a series of freely available interactive video lessons for classrooms; he is founder and director of MIT LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium), which promotes digital learning technologies to advance quality education worldwide.