Latest news

Last night at King Yen Restaurant in Berkeley the Statistics Department celebrated Professor David Brillinger. After a long an prestigious career David is retiring at the end of the spring semester. Professor Brillinger joined the UC Berkeley as a Statistics Professor in 1970 and has enriched the department with his diverse research topics. In his retirement,  David will be spending time with his family and friends in his native Canada and we hope he'll make visits back to the department.

The votes have been tallied and the results are in for the Daily Cal's 'Best of Campus 2019.' This year Statistic Department's own Professor Ani Adhikari have been voted as the best professor on campus. The students commented that her teaching style has made learning about statistics and data science more approachable for student of all disciplines.

Congratulations to our PhD students Hyun Jae (Michael) Lim, Tiffany Tang and Michelle Yu who have all been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships! The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time research-based master's and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or in STEM education.

University of California, Berkeley

The Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley invites applications for a pool of qualified temporary instructors to teach the following courses should an opening arise. Screening of applicants is ongoing and will continue as needed. The number of positions varies from semester to semester including summer sessions, depending upon the needs of the Department. Positions may range from 33% to 100% time.

Last Thursday, March 21st, 2019 was the 7th annual BSTARS. Every year this event gives our PhDs and Post-Docs the opportunity to present their research in a professional setting to the Statistics Department's Industry partners, faculty, and fellow students.

Kellie Ottoboni received the Innovation Award from the Election Verification Network (EVN) for her work with Professor Philip Stark developing the Stratified Union-Intersection Tests of Elections (SUITE) tool for use in the pilot of risk-limiting audits. The SUITE tool is a Jupyter notebook that encompasses all steps of a post-election risk-limiting audit: risk calculations, an estimate of the number of ballots to examine, and a procedure to sample and locate ballots.

The UCB Statistics Department is looking forward to having Amanda Cox, Data Editor for the New York Times, as this year's commencement speaker. We invite you to learn more about her by reading this article she's featured in from the NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/reader-center/data-visualization-edi…

Shirshendu Ganguly has been named a 2019 Sloan Research Fellow by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, "a philanthropic, New York-based grant-making institution established in 1934 by former General Motors president and CEO Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr."

We are thrilled to share that this fall we have the first graduates from our new Data Science major. In total nine undergradaute students make up the first class to gradaute from the major which was official opened earlier this semester. The Data Science major was created by Statistics and Computer Science department and offers undergradaute students an opportunity to study data from myriad angles.

A new portrait of Professor Blackwell adorns the wall of UC Berkeley newest residence Hall. Check out the full article here, https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/12/07/portrait-honoring-david-blackwell-…

Statistics community check out this interesting article on Google's new 'super-human' game playing AI. Professor Yu was interviewed for this article. Be sure to read the full article and keep an eye-open for her comments.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/google-alphazero-artificial-intel…

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS

From the BIDS new article:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS

NOTE: The applications for the Assistant Professor position must be received by November 23, 2018. For the tenured position (Associate and Full Professor), applications must be received by December 28, 2018.

From the campus news release:

Risk-limiting audits are endorsed by the American Statistical Association, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, the League of Women Voters, Verified Voting, and other election integrity groups. Colorado was the first state to require risk-limiting audits, which are also in law in California and Rhode Island, and have been tested in Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, and Denmark. Prof. Stark serves on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

From the release:

Capstone Lecturer: Department of Statistics
University of California, Berkeley

The Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley invites applications for a pool of qualified temporary instructors to teach the capstone course in the Berkeley Statistics Masters Program should an opening arise. This position is 33% time. Screening of applicants is ongoing and will continue as needed. The number of positions varies from semester to semester, depending upon the needs of the Department.

September 11, 2018, was the dedication of UC Berkeley's newest residence hall named after renown UC Berkeley Statistics Professor David Harold Blackwell. The ceremony took place in front of the new residence hall, which is now filled with first year students who moved in August 14th, 2018. The ceremony was attended by members of the Blackwell family, faculty and staff of the Statistics Department, members of the UC Berkeley administration, and staff from the residence hall community.

David Blackwell Hall, the first new residence hall to open at UC Berkeley since 2012, is a living space for more than 700 students full of patios, study rooms, bike racks, ping-pong tables, exercise machines and — if you’re lucky enough to live on the west side of the building — million-dollar views of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco skyline.