2010 Diary

These are some of the undertakings and travellings of members of the Department of Statistics during 2010. There are omissions.

World Statistics Day

20 October 2010 is to be celebrated as World Statistics Day.

The most recent issue of NZIMAges, produced by our affiliate NZIMA, features many stories regarding statistics and features many members of this Department. Read NZIMAges (PDF).

Professor Chris Wild will be delivered a read paper to the Royal Society in England, showcasing the work he has been doing in Statistics education alongside Matt Regan, Maxine Pfannkuch, and others.

Statistics New Zealand will be releasing resources regarding the official census in 2011, which is supported by the work we do on CensusAtSchool.

Find out more about World Statistics Day.

Marsden Success for Mark Holmes

Mark Holmes has been successful in the latest Marsden Fund Round, receiving a Marsden Fast-Start, "designed to support outstanding researchers early in their careers". Dr Holmes' topic is Random walks in degenerate random environments.

World Congress on Engineering

Warm congratulations to Saddam Abbasi who has won a Student Merit Award at the recent 2010 World Congress on Engineering held in London, for his paper On Sensitivity of EWMA Control Chart for Monitoring Process Variation, presented in the Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management Conference.

Tourism Forecasting Competition

Students may be interested in this competition, forwarded on by James Curran:

Recently [Rob J Hyndman] wrote a paper entitled "The tourism fore casting competition" in which we (i.e., George Athanasopoulos, Haiyan Song, Doris Wu and me) compared various forecasting methods on a relatively large set of tourism-related time series. The paper has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Forecasting.

We are now opening up the competition to anyone who thinks they can do better than the best methods we implemented in the paper. Methods will be evaluated based on the smallest MASE (Mean Absolute Scaled Error) - see Hyndman & Koehler (2006) for details of this statistic.

http://robjhyndman.com/researchtips/tourism-forecasting-competition/

Please see the competition and the paper for more information and details of the prize.

Introduction to Data Analysis with R for Forensic Scientists

Associate Professor James Curran's latest book is available on pre-order from Amazon. Introduction to Data Analysis with R for Forensic Scientists will be released in August.

Dr Lyndon Walker

I am sure that will join me in congratulating Lyndon Walker who has been awarded his PhD in Sociology and Statistics, Modelling Inter-Ethnic Partnerships in New Zealand: A census based approach.

Lyndon Walker gave a seminar on his research earlier in the year.

Chew-Seng Chee

One of our PhD students, Chew-Seng Chee, came equal second in the students' presentation competition at the NZSA conference in Palmerston North last week. The title of his talk was:

Mixture-based nonparametric density estimation: Maximum likelihood vs. least squares.

Hoang Nguyen

A new PhD student, Hoang Nguyen from Vietnam joins us today. His proposed research topic is Statistics Applied to Statistical Biology, Multivariate Modeling and Inference.

Hoang will be supervised by Thomas Yee, co-supervised by Yong Wang with Chris Wild being the advisor.

Congratulations Hoang on being accepted to study for a PhD in our department and best wishes with your study and research.

Faculty Research Development Fund

Warmest congratulations to Stephane Guindon who has been awarded funding for a post-doctoral fellowship from the Faculty Research Development Fund.

Congratulations also to Maxine (and Ivan) who were also successful.

HRC Grant

Congratulations to Patricia for winning as PI an HRC grant for over $500,000 entitled Predictors of CVD mortality and morbidity in NZ adults.

Ivan Kojadinovic

Ivan Kojadinovic has resigned to take up an appointment at the University of Pau where Jessica has also been able to obtain research funding. They will be leaving Auckland in early September.

Head of Department, Chris Triggs, would like to thank Ivan for all he has done for the department in the three years he has been with us. I am sure that you will join me in wishing both Ivan and Jessica well in their new positions.

Departures in June

June brings the farewell of our visitor David Matthews, along with Senior Research Fellow Dr. Brian Browning and Dr. Sharon Browning who are leaving us to take up their new positions at the University of Washington.

Sharon will be a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics.

Brian will be an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics.

Are DNA profiles as rare as we think? Or can we trust DNA statistics?

James Curran has an invited paper Are DNA profiles as rare as we think? Or can we trust DNA statistics? in Significance 7(2) p62-66, the Royal Statistical Society's general interest journal.

Paul Murrell

Paul Murrell has been elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Stéphane Guindon

Stéphane Guindon has been awarded an Early Career Excellence Award.

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Seminars in 2010. Go back to 2009.

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