Varian

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, will be the Economic Outlook Luncheon speaker on August 3, from 12:30–1:50 p.m. during the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings. Google has been at the forefront of applying a wide range of economic and statistical methods to improve businesses, including using auction markets to price advertising as well as using search results for prediction. The roundtable luncheon is $40, which is not included with registration.

The section is also sponsoring four invited sessions at the meetings, including a timely session on central bank forecasting, with speakers from the Federal Reserve System and the Bank of England. A session on Bayesian time-series methods includes Sid Chib and John Geweke as speakers; another session on time-series analysis focuses on official statistics; and a session on financial statistics focuses on volatility estimation.

Topic-contributed sessions, organized by Tucker McElroy, include issues in seasonality, benchmarking, and temporal disaggregation of time series, real-time trend estimation, and the statistical analysis of education issues. The 17 contributed sessions feature topics ranging from forecasting and binary prediction to long-memory modeling and extreme values.

The section also will participate in this year’s roundtable discussion program at JSM. Mary Batcher, an executive director in the Washington, DC, offices of the national tax quantitative economics and statistics group of Ernst and Young, LLP, will lead a discussion on “Statisticians in Business – Keys to Success.” Batcher leads the statistics and sampling practice and is well suited to facilitate what hopes to be a lively and practical discussion on what it really takes to succeed as a statistician in today’s business environment.