Laura Slakey, the MSO of the Statistics Department, was selected once again to receive an Excellence in Management award from the Berkeley Staff Assembly committee for 2018. Congratulations Laura!
This year's commencement was a wonderful celebration for all those who participated, whether it was students, parents, faculty or staff. We had more students participate than even before in our graduation ceremony which took place at Zellerbach Playhouse on Monday, May 14th, 2018.
The University Medal is one of the most competitive and prestigious awards given to a graduating senior at UC Berkeley. To qualify students must embody the mission and message of the university, have made a meaningful impact on their community, overcome significant personal obstacles, and maintained a 3.96 GPA or better.
We are excited to share that the team behind Project Jupyter has been awarded the ACM Software System Award. The team includes Statistics faculty member Fernando Perez. Professor Perez was one of the original developers of iPython, the program from which Project Jupyter has its roots. Project Jupyter has been revolutionary and its open collaborative platform allows users to create tools for interactive computing.
Prof. Ani Adhikari has been invited to give the Last Lecture by UC Berkeley Senior Class Council 2018, along with Prof. Darren Zook of Political Science. From the article:
With the NBA final getting under way, check out this youtube video featuring Professor Lisa Goldberg as she discusses her paper digging deeper into the theory of the hot hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPZFQ6i759g
Congratulations to Jianbo Chen who was awarded the Citadel Student Fellowship 2018-19! 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.
Professor Steve Evans has been selected by UNC- Chapel Hill's Department of Statistics & Operations Research as the 2018 Hotelling speaker. As the Hotelling speaker Professor Evans will give two lectures next week at UNC- Chapel Hill. Here's a link to the article on UNC's website, https://stat-or.unc.edu/archives/3484.
Congratulations to PhD student Olivia Angiuli who has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship! The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.
Berkeley News reported that UC Berkeley will offer Data 8, the fastest growing course in university history, for free online. This is another way UC Berkeley takes its mission to serve the public seriously and provides the community with free access to amazing courses.
Monday March 12th 2018 was our 6th Berkeley Statistics Research Annual Symposium. It was a fantastic event with over 100 attendees comprise of faculty, graduate students, post-docs, and industry partners. There were 16 UCB PhD & post-doc thunder talks as well as 6 talks from Statistics Department IAP members. The talks were followed by a lively poster session with 21 posters from UCB PhD & post-docs.
Prof. Michael Jordan has been named a Plenary Lecturer at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro. This honor has been bestowed on only a small handful of statisticians over the hundred-year history of the ICM.
The university made an exciting announcement that a new dorm will be named after Emeritus Statistics Professor David Blackwell. Professor Blackwell was the first African-American tenured faculty member at UC Berkeley. The Statistics Department is happy to share that his memory will live on and incoming students will learn about him by living in a building named after him.
Bin Yu and Ben Brown's grant is featured in the news release:
The Bayesian Statistical Science Section announced the outcome of their 2018 student paper competition. They had forty entrants and UCB Statistics Ph.D. student Ryan Giordano was one of ten who was selected to receive a travel award to attend the JSM in Vancouver this coming July.
After Citadel's nationwide datathon series last year, winners from 20 different universities were invited to take part in a week long finale. The group from UC Berkeley, which included two Statistics Department PhD students Soeren Kuenzel and Jake Soloff, were chosen as the winners!
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 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, depending upon the needs of the Department. Positions may range from 33% to 100% time.
UC Berkeley has been awarded a grant to create a new Foundations of Data Analysis (FODA) Institute. The FODA Institute is part of the NSF TRIPODS program, and it is designed to bring together core research communities in theoretical statistics, applied mathematics, and theoretical computer science to address foundational questions at the heart of data science.
In case you missed it, World Statistics Day was October 20th! Check out this interesting post written by the UCB Statistics Department's own Professor Bin Yu for the National Academy of Sciences. Her post discusses the key statistical components which influence and impact the emerging field of data science and some interesting historical events that first combine the fields of statistics and computer science.