Last month my colleagues and I received the Ariel Liebman Memorial Impact Award for 2025. This recognises research that has significantly contributed to optimisation technologies and embodies innovation, excellence, collaboration and real-world impact.

Congratulations to the whole team: Alexander Ek, Michelle Blom, Peter Stuckey, Philip Stark and myself.

We received the award for our work developing the AWAIRE method for auditing preferential elections. This is described in the following three papers:

• The original AWAIRE paper, where we introduced our new method that uses adaptively weighted averages of test supermartingales. This won a best paper award at a conference in 2023.
• The ‘weighting schemes’ paper, a follow-up investigation of many different weighting algorithms that could be used in the AWAIRE method.
• The ‘incremental AWAIRE’ paper, where we developed a new, more practical implementation of AWAIRE, using techniques from optimisation to substantially improve computational efficiency and allow us to tackle much larger elections.

Our open-source implementation of AWAIRE is freely available online. We are currently in the process of integrating it into the SHANGRLA software package.

I have greatly enjoyed working on this project, especially the opportunity to do something truly interdisciplinary. Our method combines the latest ideas in the fields of statistics and optimisation, something none of us could do alone!

The award was given by OPTIMA, a research and training centre in optimisation technologies and applications. It is a joint initiative between the University of Melbourne and Monash University, with funding from the Australian Research Council.