Karen Kafadar

It is a pleasure to serve as ASA president as we welcome 2019 and to have the opportunity to thank our many members who make the ASA a professional home for statisticians and data analysts, as it has been for me. I was honored and gratified to receive many offers of help, as the ASA would not exist without its members. I hope the year will be an exciting one for all of us.

Among the many members who deserve special thanks are those who serve on our annual board of directors; lead our chapters, sections, and committees; and participate in their activities. The real work of ASA is done by them and by you, facilitated by the hard-working ASA staff, and I am grateful to all of you for your ideas and efforts. Keep those ideas coming! They are key to the ASA’s success, impact, and relevance to our membership and society.

Every ASA president is asked to pursue initiatives that, we hope, will outlive the president and take on lives of their own. In developing initiatives for 2019, I reflected on my remarks prepared in the March 2017 issue of Amstat News.

Our discipline faces many challenges, both technical and professional. We have seen how the work of statisticians has made enormous contributions in many fields of science and policy. How can we continue to make those contributions in the face of rapidly changing technologies, data collection, and computation? Our strengths lie in collecting and analyzing data and in drawing inferences from them. Other disciplines continue to challenge us in these areas, but I believe we can prevail by facing complex problems and showing our skills and impact.

Accordingly, the theme for JSM 2019 (July 27 – August 1 in Denver, Colorado) is “Making an Impact.” Many of us—certainly I—chose this profession out of a hopeful desire to solve real problems that will have lasting societal effects. Impactful work can arise as academic teaching and research, government advice and policy, and industrial operations and strategies.

I am pleased Richard Levine of San Diego State University has agreed to serve as 2019 JSM Program Committee chair, ably assisted by co-chairs Nicole Lazar and Duane Steffey and the rest of the hard-working program committee, to carry this theme into action. The deadline for submitting a contributed paper or poster is February 1, so I hope many of you will share your experiences of making an impact with your colleagues at JSM. I look forward to seeing and hearing about them!

My three initiatives center on promoting the ASA’s leadership in identifying problems and coordinating efforts where statistics, through collaboration with others, can make a difference. My first initiative is an example of one such problem, the second generalizes to a structure that makes collaboration possible, and the third addresses the recruitment of talent needed to solve these problems.

‘Fake News’ (‘Disinformation’)

As one JSM attendee mentioned to me last year, errors in reporting and journalism are not new. But today’s technology can spread disinformation at lightning speed, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Understanding how claims are spread via social media and online communities is essential to ensuring the public is not misled by “fake news.”

Computer scientists are developing algorithms to classify stories and images as “legitimate” or “illegitimate” (some, if not most, news articles have elements of both); see, for example, the March 9, 2018, issue of Science. Statisticians have worked on classification since well before Fisher’s linear discriminant analysis. But the volume, variety, and nature of news articles are immense, so “classification” algorithms need both sound theoretical foundations and the knowledge to implement them even faster than the stories can be generated.

I am delighted that this initiative is under the able leadership of 2016 ASA President Jessica Utts, whose themes during her tenure included “communication with the media” and “statistical education,” and Jun Yang, co-chair of Duke’s computer science department who has contributed much research in this area. They hope to develop the following:

• A research agenda and plan for encouraging statisticians and data scientists to engage in research and collaborate in this area
• A plan for creating mechanisms (public information campaign or venues for dissemination) that will help the public understand and be less influenced by fake news.

The membership of the task force therefore includes statisticians, computer scientists, psychologists, and journalists.

Impact

Fake news is just one area in which statisticians, in collaboration with other scientists, can make an impact. Complex problems—such as detecting emerging epidemics, ensuring food safety, protecting our communications, and establishing reliable standards—cannot be solved by single individuals or even single disciplines. What talents do these projects need, and how can the ASA be prepared to lead the research and collaboration on them with statistically sound approaches?

Throughout his career at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ASA Vice President David Williamson has encountered many high-profile situations in which his input as a statistician was critical (as have we all), so I am thrilled David has agreed to lead this initiative.

On what problems has your work made a difference, and how did your involvement arise? For example, can statisticians work with geologists and environmental scientists in assessing the risks and benefits of fracking? (Byran Smucker at Miami of Ohio has agreed to serve on this task force, as he has contacts already thinking about this problem.) We need to anticipate these needs before others capitalize on our delay and develop attractive, but flawed, approaches.

A key aspect to the initiative’s success is the identification of research areas where problems need teams that include statistical thinking, design, experimentation, data collection, and analysis. Donna LaLonde, ASA director of strategic initiatives and outreach, has created a form so you can share your thoughts about high-impact problems in which statistics can and should be involved. Such identified areas will lead the task force toward types of mechanisms that can successfully coordinate research teams in future years.

The goal of this initiative will be to advise ASA on mechanisms that do the following:

• Identify important problem areas in which statistics is needed
• Coordinate teams of researchers to work on such problems
• Make ASA members aware of high-profile, high-impact opportunities and how they can participate
• Showcase progress and outcomes of the collaborations

Recruiting Talent into Our Profession

Our profession is filled with talented people—and much more talent remains untapped, largely because whole communities are unaware of our field. The challenges described in the first two initiatives require diverse talent that include domain scientists and the best statistical solutions from statisticians we attract to our field to face big problems. How can we collaborate with other organizations to recruit talent among underserved populations who would be attracted to statistics if they knew about its importance and opportunities?

Board member Julia Sharp has graciously agreed to lead this initiative, whose charge includes the following:

• A plan for engaging the leadership of other organizations in establishing a joint committee that will focus on recruiting minorities and first-generation college students into statistics
• A plan for developing a sustainable source of funding to support the initiatives of the joint committee

Sixty years ago, John Tukey wrote the following in The American Mathematical Monthly:

It is a pleasure to start 2019 as ASA president at a time when Tukey’s remarks are perhaps more important than when he wrote them. I look forward to working with you to institutionalize our efforts to seek out challenges, identify where and how statistics can contribute, and marshal the diverse talent needed to address these challenges so that we, as a profession, can contribute much-needed “acuteness and wisdom under uncomfortable circumstances.”