The Kingsman Prize was established in memory of the long-standing scholar of Management Science, Professor Brian Kingsman. The 2020 prize has been awarded to STOR-i PhD graduate Jake Clarkson.

Jake’s supervisor Kevin Glazebrook has written the following citation:

“The analysis of search problems has been a major focus of (inter alia)military OR for decades. The subject of Jake’s doctoral work was proposed by Professor Kyle Lin of the Operations Research Department of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA under the strategic academic partner programme of the STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training.

In his thesis, Jake secures two major extensions to classical search results achieved around six decades ago by Blackwell and others. In the first of these, Jake posits that (motivated by the emergence of a range of modern search technologies) there are alternative search mechanisms (labelled fast and slow) available to the decision-maker. The problem then becomes not only where to search (the exclusive focus of the classical work) but also how. This development poses major challenges to analysis. It emerged in the course of Jake’s work that at least one incorrect analysis of this problem had secured publication previously. In Jake’s work, the theoretical analysis provides both solutions for certain instances of the problem, but (more importantly) powerful insights which facilitate the development of strongly performing heuristics in general. This first part of the thesis has already been published in Operations Research. The second part of the thesis concerns a game theoretic formulation in which an adversarial hider seeks to make the search as difficult as possible. This game is semi-infinite and considerable technical innovation is required to secure a successful analysis. A major paper covering this part of the work is in preparation. “