JSM Bound

Keynote Speakers Chosen for Knowledge, Dedication

As the ASA membership gears up for JSM 2012, those planning to attend the annual meetings must decide which sessions to attend and which activities to undertake. There are many to choose from, but 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 and hope you will consider attending their addresses.

ASA President’s Invited Address

Alan B. Krueger
Monday, July 30, 4:00 p.m
Alan B. Krueger is chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Cabinet. He is on leave from Princeton University, where he is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He has held a joint appointment in the economics department and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton since 1987, and he served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994–1995. He earned his bachelor’s degree, with honors, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and an AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University. Krueger was a member of the board of directors of the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education at Charles University in the Czech Republic, as well as a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization. He also is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economists, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In addition to receiving the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal by the Indian Econometric Society and the Kershaw Prize by the Association for Public Policy and Management, he has authored or coauthored several books about economics.
 

ASA Deming Lecture

Jeff Wu
“Quality Evolution and Revolution: From Autos and Chips to Nano and Bio”
Tuesday, July 31, 4:00 p.m.
Jeff Wu’s research contributions span the full range of statistics, from theory to application, and touch many applied domains, from sample surveys to nanotechnology. They are notable for their combination of novelty, technical strength, and far-reaching vision. He has made especially significant contributions to experimental design. As one of his supporters wrote, “In view of professor Wu’s contribution to design of experiments, it is particularly fitting for him to deliver a lecture that honors R. A. Fisher, commonly regarded as father of the modern theory of experimental design.”
 

ASA Presidential Address

Robert N. Rodriguez
Tuesday, July 31, 8:00 p.m.
ASA President Robert Rodriguez is senior director of research and development at global software firm SAS. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in statistics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also is an adjunct professor of statistics and operations research. Before joining SAS, he worked at General Motors Research Laboratories as a research scientist. He has chaired and served on a number of ASA committees, as well as committees of the North Carolina Chapter of the ASA. He is an ASA Fellow and, in 2009, received the prestigious ASA Founders Award.
 

IMS Medallion Lecture I

Yoav Benjamini
“Selective Inference”
Monday, July 30, 10:30 a.m.
Yoav Benjamini is a professor of statistics in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at Tel Aviv University. His areas of interest include biostatistics, statistical genetics, bioinformatics, meteorology, zoology, data mining, and quality. He has published numerous papers and is a member of the Israel Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, The Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Eastern Mediterranean Region of the International Biometric Society.
 

IMS Medallion Lecture II

Emmanuel Candes
“Sparse and Low-Rank Models in Statistics: Theory and Applications”
Tuesday, July 31, 10:30 a.m.
Emmanuel Candes is the Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics and professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford University. Prior to this, he was the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He earned his PhD in statistics from Stanford University in 1998. His research interests are in computational harmonic analysis, mathematical optimization, statistical estimation and detection, with applications to the imaging sciences, signal processing, scientific computing, and inverse problems. Candes has received numerous awards, most notably the 2006 Alan T. Waterman Medal. Other awards include the 2005 James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, awarded by the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM); 2008 Information Theory Society Paper Award; 2010 George Polya Prize, awarded by SIAM; and 2011 Collatz Prize, awarded by the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He has given more than 50 plenary lectures at major international conferences.
 

IMS Medallion Lecture III

Donald Geman
“Order Statistics and Gene Regulation”
Wednesday, August 1, 10:30 a.m.
Donald Geman earned his BA in literature from the University of Illinois and PhD in mathematics from Northwestern University. He was a distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts until 2001, when he joined the department of applied mathematics and statistics at The Johns Hopkins University. There, he is a member of the Center for Imaging Science and Institute for Computational Medicine. His main areas of research are statistical learning, computer vision, and computational biology. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
 

COPSS Fisher Lecture

Roderick Little
“In Praise of Simplicity, Not Mathematistry! Ten Simple, Powerful Ideas for the Statistical Scientist”
Wednesday, August 1, 4:00 p.m.
Roderick Little is the Richard D. Remington Collegiate Professor in the biostatistics department at the University of Michigan and associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the U.S. Census Bureau. He earned his bachelor’s in mathematics at Cambridge University and his master’s and PhD in statistics and operational research at Imperial College, London. His research interests include incomplete data, sample surveys, Bayesian statistics, and applied statistics. His primary research interest is the analysis of data sets with missing values. An ISI highly cited researcher, he has refereed more than 170 publications, notably on methods for the analysis of data with missing values and model-based survey inference. In 2005, he received the ASA Wilks Memorial Award. Read more about Little in “Roderick Little to Deliver COPSS Fisher Lecture in San Diego.”