Prof. Terry Speed won the 2014 Jerome Sacks award from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).
The award recognizes his "sustained, high-quality cross-disciplinary research involving the statistical sciences" and cites him as "a pioneer in the development and application of statistical methods for the analysis of biomedical and genomic data."
Just after 4pm on Wednesday August 6th, at the 2014 JSM in Boston, our colleague Martin Wainwright received the year’s COPSS Presidents’ Award, the most prestigious award for young researchers in our discipline.
"Michael Jordan, a leading UC Berkeley researcher in the fields of computer science and statistics, is the 2015 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize, a prestigious honor reserved for those who have made fundamental contributions to the theoretical foundations of human cognition."
Prof. Martin Wainwright has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). An induction ceremony took place July 8, 2014 at the IMS Annual Meeting in Sydney, Australia.
Professor Wainwright received the award for his fundamental research in statistical machine learning and high-dimensional statistics, specifically sparse modeling, graphical models, data compression and coding.
Former VIGRE Postdoc Emilia Huerta-Sanchez and her advisor, Rasmus Nielsen, have found a genetic link between Tibetans, Sherpas and an extinct race, the Denisovans. The gene enables its bearers to live at very high altitudes. "Sorting out obscure genetic evidence like this required intricate statistical calculations, and it was Huerta-Sánchez who did it," Nielsen said.
Spring 2014 courses supported by the cloud
A conference "Combinatorial Stochastic Processes" in celebration of Jim Pitman's work was held at U.C. San Diego, June 20-21 2014.
See http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Pitman_Conference/ for photos and slides from the talks.
The African American Faculty and Senior Staff Oral History Project has shared their interview of Professor David Blackwell, conducted by Nadine Wilmot in 2002 and 2003.
Lisa discusses the Monty Hall problem on Numberphile, a mathematical YouTube series produced by British filmmaker Brady Haran. A follow-up video featuring Brady adds to the discussion.
Congratulations to Bin Yu on her election to the National Academy of Sciences!
NAS Press Release: http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/april-29-2014-NAS-Election.html
Registration for the 2014 Workshop on Algorithms for Modern Massive Data Sets (MMDS 2014) is now available.
Congratulations to Jonathan who was awarded the Citadel Student Fellowship for 2014-15! Citadel generously supports an annual graduate student fellowship. This competitive fellowship provides a year of support to an exceptional PhD graduate student within the department.
Congratulations to two of our first-year Statistics PhD students, Yannik Pitcan and Andre Waschka, who won National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships!
Prof. Bin Yu and five other Berkeley faculty--Josh Bloom (Astronomy), Michael Franklin (EECS), Joseph Hellerstein (EECS), AnnaLee Saxenian (I School), and Ion Stoica (EECS)--named among "21 Thought-Leader Professors in Data Science".
Assistant professor Ben Recht and graduate student Ashia Wilson are featured on the Berkeley Research Highlights web page. Read more about the work and life of Ben Recht – a winner of the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers here.
Continuing the series of three highly successful MOOCS she taught last year, Prof. Ani Adhikari is teaching Statistics 2.1X again right now, to an audience of over 28,000 students. Last year's 2.1X-2.3X series had near-record completion rates of 15%, 17%, and 9%, compared to typical completion rates of 4-5%.
Professor Brillinger will receive an honorary D.Sc. from the University of Toronto in June, in recognition "of his pioneering contributions to the fields of stochastic analysis and time series analysis." This is Prof. Brillinger's fourth honorary doctorate.
Assistant Professor Ben Recht, who holds a joint appointment in the departments of EECS and Statistics, is one of 102 recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.