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JSM 2013 Keynote Speakers

1 May 2013 1,019 views No Comment
The keynote addresses are special. Each speaker was chosen specifically for his or her vast knowledge of statistics and dedicated work in the field. Here, we introduce these speakers.

    ASA President’s Invited Address

      Nate Silver

      Nate Silver
      August 5, 4:00 p.m.

      Nate Silver is founder of the award-winning political website FiveThirtyEight.com, where he publishes a running forecast of current elections and hot-button issues. Called a “number-crunching prodigy” by New York Magazine, he first gained national attention during the 2008 presidential election when he correctly predicted the results of the primaries and the presidential winner in 49 states. Silver’s prediction of the 2012 presidential election in all 50 states, silencing the traditional political pundits, has made him the public face of statistical analysis, data-driven journalism, and political forecasting.

      Silver has appeared on national television programs ranging from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” His New York Times bestseller, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, takes the reader on a tour of predictive statistical modeling and analysis across a host of fields, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the power of data-driven forecasting.

      Before he came to politics, Silver established his credentials as an analyst of baseball statistics. He developed the widely acclaimed PECOTA system, which predicts player performance, career development, and seasonal winners and losers. He is author of a series of books on baseball statistics, including Mind Game, Baseball Between the Numbers, and It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over. He has written for ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times.

      Silver has been honored with a series of accolades, from being named one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People by TIME in 2009 to one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Agents of Change. And FiveThirtyEight.com won “best political coverage” in the 2008 Weblog Awards.

      IMS Presidential Address

        Hans Rudolf Kuensch

        Hans Rudolf Kuensch
        “Ars conjectandi: 300 Years Later
        August 5, 8:00 p.m.

        Hans Kuensch was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and earned both his undergraduate degree and his PhD from ETH Zurich in 1975 and 1980, respectively. He was a researcher and postdoc in Japan from 1976–1977 and 1982–1983. In 1983, he took a position as professor in the department of mathematics at ETH Zurich that he still holds today. His work covers areas from probability theory and theoretical statistics to applications in environmental models.

        ASA Deming Lecture

          Vijay Nair

          Vijay Nair
          August 6, 4:00 p.m.

          Vijay Nair is the D.A. Darling Professor of Statistics and Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Institute of Mathematics Statistics, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. His scientific interests are broad and include methodology, theory, and applications. He has worked in engineering statistics, reliability and degradation modeling, network tomography, design and analysis of experiments (including applications in behavioral intervention research), and quality improvement.

          Wald Lectures I and II

            Piet Groeneboom

            Piet Groeneboom
            Wald Lecture I: “Nonparametric Estimation Under Shape Constraints
            August 6, 4:00 p.m.
            Wald Lecture II
            August 7, 8:30 a.m.

            Piet Groeneboom has been professor of statistics at Delft University since 1988, having previously been professor of statistics at the University of Amsterdam. He earned his PhD in mathematics in 1979 under the direction of J. Oosterhoff. He has been visiting professor at the University of Washington, Stanford University, and Université Paris VI and has done research in the areas of large deviations, stochastic geometry, particle systems, inverse statistical problems, and statistical inference under order restrictions.

            Groeneboom has been on the editorial board of the Annals of Statistics (three times) and is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He also received the Rollo Davidson Prize and is finishing a book to be published by Cambridge University Press on the topic of his Wald lectures.

            ASA Presidential Address

              Marie Davidian

              Marie Davidian
              The International Year of Statistics: A Celebration and a Call to Action
              August 6, 8:00 p.m.

              ASA President Marie Davidian is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University and adjunct professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Duke University. She earned her doctoral degree in statistics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

              Davidian is an ASA Fellow and former chair of the Committee on Nominations, Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Medal Committee, and Biometrics Section. She is a past president of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society and current executive editor of the journal Biometrics. She is recipient of the George W. Snedecor and Florence Nightingale David awards, presented by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.

              Since 2004, Davidian has co-directed the joint NC State-Duke Clinical Research Institute Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics, which is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and seeks to encourage U.S. undergraduates to pursue advanced training in biostatistics and statistics.

              Rietz Lecture

                Larry Wasserman

                Larry Wasserman
                Geometric and Topological Inference
                August 7, 10:30 a.m.

                Larry Wasserman is a professor in the department of statistics and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include nonparametric inference, machine learning, statistical topology, and astrostatistics. He writes the wildly popular blog Normal Deviate. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain climbing, parachuting, and big game hunting.

                Public Lecture to Commemorate the 300th Anniversary of Ars Conjectandi

                  David John Spiegelhalter

                  David John Spiegelhalter
                  From Gambling to Global Catastrophe: Metaphors and Images for Communicating Numerical Risks
                  Wednesday, August 7, 2:00 p.m.




                  COPSS Fisher Lecture

                    Peter J. Bickel

                    Peter J. Bickel
                    From Fisher to Big Data: Continuities and Discontinuities
                    August 7, 4:00 p.m.

                    Peter Bickel earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics and his Phd in statistics at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Erich Lehmann. He retired from the State Department in 2006, but continues an active research program in network theory and bioinformatics.

                    Bickel has made wide-ranging contributions to statistical science. His research in the early period was mostly theoretical, including nonparametrics, sequential analysis, classical asymptotic theory, robust statistics, higher-order asymptotics, and nonparametric function estimation. His applied work includes an often-cited 1975 Science paper, in which he, Eugene A. Hammel, and J.W. O’Connell gave an explanation of an apparent gender bias in graduate admissions at UC Berkeley by relating it to Simpson’s paradox.

                    Bickel has received the Institute of Mathematical Statistics’ Wald and Rietz lectureships, the COPSS Presidents’ Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and earned an honorary doctoral degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bickel contributed to the profession and society more broadly as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Bernoulli Society and by serving on committees of the National Academies and other organizations.

                    IMS Medallion Lecture I

                      Gady Kozma

                      Gady Kozma
                      Linearly Reinforced Random Walk
                      August 4, 4:00 p.m.




                      IMS Medallion Lecture II

                        Jeremy Quastel

                        Jeremy Quastel
                        The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang Equation and Universality Class
                        August 5, 8:30 a.m.

                        A specialist in probability theory, stochastic processes, and partial differential equations, Jeremy Quastel has been at the University of Toronto since 1998. A native of Canada, he studied at McGill University, then the Courant Institute at New York University, where he completed his PhD in 1990 under the direction of S.R.S. Varadhan. Quastel was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, then a faculty member at the University of California at Davis until he returned to Canada in 1998.

                        Quastel’s research is on the large-scale behavior of interacting particle systems and stochastic partial differential equations. He was a Sloan Fellow from 1996–1998 and an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad 2010. He gave the Current Developments in Mathematics 2011 and St. Flour 2012 lectures and was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematical Physics in Aalborg 2012.

                        IMS Medallion Lecture III

                          Martin Wainwright

                          Martin Wainwright
                          Statistics Meets Computation: Efficiency Trade-Offs in High Dimensions
                          August 5, 2:00 p.m.

                          Martin Wainwright joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004, and is currently a professor with a joint appointment between the department of statistics and department of electrical engineering and computer sciences. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for which he was awarded the George M. Sprowls Prize in 2002. He is an associate editor for the Annals of Statistics, Journal of Machine Learning Research, and Information and Inference.

                          Wainwright is interested in large-scale statistical models and their applications to communication and coding, machine learning, and statistical signal and image processing. He received an NSF-CAREER Award in 2006, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship in 2005, an Okawa Research Grant in Information and Telecommunications in 2005, IEEE Best Paper awards from the Signal Processing Society in 2008 and Communications Society in 2010, the Joint Paper Award from IEEE Information Theory and Communication Societies in 2012, and several outstanding conference paper awards.

                          IMS Medallion Lecture IV

                            Lutz Duembgen

                            Lutz Duembgen
                            Multiscale Methods and Shape Constraints
                            August 6, 8:30 a.m.

                            Lutz Duembgen studied mathematics and biology/chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, where he joined Statlab and finished his PhD thesis about nonparametric change-point estimation in 1990 under D.W. Müller.

                            From 1990–1992, Duembgen spent two years at the University of California at Berkeley as a research fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science. He then returned to Heidelberg and, after a short stay at the University of Bielefeld in 1993, started working on his habilitation thesis, which he finished in 1996. In 1997, he accepted a position as professor of stochastics at the (Medical) University at Lübeck and joined the Mathematical Institute. In 2002, Duembgen started working at the University of Bern, Switzerland, as a professor of statistics within the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science and department of mathematics and statistics and continues there today.

                            IMS Medallion Lecture V

                              Peter Guttorp

                              Peter Guttorp
                              Pointing in New Directions
                              August 6, 10:30 a.m.

                              Peter Guttorp is professor of statistics, guest professor at the Norwegian Computing Center, project leader for the Nordic Network on Statistical Approaches to Regional Climate Models for Adaptation, co-director of the Research Network on Statistical Methods for Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, adjunct professor of statistics at Simon Fraser University, and member of the interdisciplinary faculties in quantitative ecology and resource management and Urban Design and Planning.

                              He earned a degree in journalism from the Stockholm School of Journalism in 1969; a BS in mathematics, mathematical statistics, and musicology from Lund University, Sweden, in 1974; a PhD in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980; and a TechD hc from Lund University in 2009. He joined the University of Washington faculty in September 1980.

                              Guttorp’s research interests include uses of stochastic models in scientific applications in hydrology, atmospheric science, geophysics, environmental science, and hematology. He is co-editor of Environmetrics. He is also former president of the International Environmetrics Society, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. From 2004–2005, he was the Environmental Research Professor of the Swedish Institute of Graduate Engineers.

                              IMS Medallion Lecture VI

                                Judea Pearl

                                Judea Pearl
                                The Mathematics of Causal Inference
                                August 6, 2:00 p.m.

                                Judea Pearl, professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles, is known for his contributions to artificial intelligence and his theories for inference under uncertainty, most notably the Bayesian network approach, which has influenced diverse fields such as statistics, philosophy, health, economics, social sciences, and cognitive sciences. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pearl has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” Using some of the proceeds from the award, Pearl established the Causality in Statistics Education Award, aimed at encouraging the teaching of basic causal inference in introductory statistics courses.

                                IMS Medallion Lecture VII

                                  Ya’acov Ritov

                                  Ya’acov Ritov
                                  A Priori Analysis of Complex Models
                                  August 8, 8:30 a.m.

                                  Ya’acov Ritov is a professor in the department of statistics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned a BSc and MSc in electrical engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a PhD in statistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After a short post-doctorate period at the University of California at Berkeley, he was appointed in Jerusalem in 1984.

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