James Yu was a nominee for a 2019 Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. James, who is a Computer Science major at the University of Waterloo, worked on integer linear programming under the guidance of C&O Professor Laurent Poirrier from May to August, 2018.
James and Laurent proposed a measure of strength of a cutting plane. This measure, which they called the depth of a cutting plane, was studied and shown to be a good proxy for the practical strength of cutting planes. They also showed that the depth of an individual cutting plane for polyhedra can be computing in polynomial time via a linear programming (LP) formulation, and can be computed in closed form for corner polyhedra.
A research paper, entitled On the depth of cutting planes, has been submitted for publication.