The Alabama-Mississippi chapter hosted a mini-conference April 5 at The University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). Nearly 70 current and prospective chapter members attended from The University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, The University of Memphis, and University of Central Arkansas.
The keynote speaker was Robert Serfling, who is an ASA Fellow, IMS Fellow, and former NSF program officer. The title of his talk was “Depth, Outlyingness, Quantile and Rank Functions in Multivariate and Other Data Settings.”
Student presenters and their topics included the following:
- Aleksandr Beknazaryan of The University of Mississippi, “On Mutual Information Estimation for Mixed-Pair Random Variable”
- Torumoy Ghoshal of The University of Mississippi, “Improving Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Feature Embedding”
- Boyi Guo of The University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Estimating Optimal Treatment Regimes Using Multivariate Random Forests”
- Rachel Haggard of The University of Mississippi, “Challenges of Data Visualization: Exploring Effective Ways of Mapping Margins of Errors”
- Anastasia Hartzes of The University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Comparing Lumped and Unlumped Markov Chains: Investigations into Goodness of Fit”
- Zhixin Wang of The University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Consideration of Batch Effects in Phase II Cancer Clinical Trial”
The chapter also held a business meeting. Topics of discussion included a recap of recent Alabama-Mississippi Chapter activities, a report on the ASA Council of Chapters meeting, criteria for the ASA chapter awards, and a chapter treasurer’s report. In addition, the chapter accepted nominations for the vacant vice president position and reelected Hailin Sang of The University of Mississippi as secretary.
Continuing officers include President Jon Woody (Mississippi State University), Treasurer Bob Oster (The University of Alabama at Birmingham), and Council of Chapters Representative Jeff Szychowski (The University of Alabama at Birmingham). Elections for president and treasurer will be held in 2020.
Finally, it was announced that the chapter name has been changed to the “Alabama-Mississippi Chapter.”
Leave a Reply