2009 Diary

These are some of the undertakings and travellings of members of the Department of Statistics during 2009. There are omissions.

IBS Conference Taupo

The regional biennial conference of the International Biometric Society, Australasian Region, was held in Taupo. Many people from the Department attended or were involved in organising. Two of our PhD students received Young Statisticians awards.

Professor Chris Triggs gave a keynote address on Thursday morning. Associate Professor Ross Ihaka gave an invited speech on Writing Efficient Programs in R and Beyond.

Maryanne Pirie, Rachel Fewster, Alastair Scott, Thomas Yee, Katrina Poppe, Renate Meyer, Kathy Ruggiero, Jonathan Briggs, Chew-Seng Chee, and Jing Liu all presented.

Katrina Poppe won an award for her presentation on Can functional data analysis be used to develop a new measure of global cardiac function? Jonathan Briggs received an award for his presentation on Filtering in high dimension dynamic systems using copulas.

Kathy Ruggiero chaired the local organising committee while James Curran chaired the Scientific Programme Committee.

Wattyl Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge

Three members took part in the 160 kilometre bicycle race around Lake Taupo at the end of November.

Stephanie Budgett, Jonathan Briggs, and Kath Everard all completed the bike ride.

An R Workshop - Summer Fun with R

Associate Professor Thomas Lumley, University of Washington, was at the Department to present a full day workshop on using R.

Cluster Randomised Trials (CRT 2009)

A successful biostatistics workshop was held in the Department from 25 - 26 November on the topic of Cluster Randomised Trials. Professor Martin Bland was the keynote speaker.

Congratulations to Stephen Vander Hoorn and Yannan Jiang from our statistical consulting unit for organising this.

NZMASP 2009: New Zealand Mathematics and Statistics Postgraduate Conference

Students from this Department attended NZMASP 2009 in Foxton Beach.

Lyndon Walker received an award for his talk on Inter-Ethnic Partnerships in New Zealand: A Census-Based Approach.

Adidas Auckland Marathon

Werner Schmidt completed the Adidas Auckland Half Marathon walk in 2:42, placing him 3^rd in his age range, and 113^th overall. Stephen Cope completed the Half Marathon in 2:10, placing him 836^th in his age range.

Dr Derek Law

Derek successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congratulations Dr Law!

NZSA 2009

Keng-Hao (Danny) Chang, a MSc student in the department, has won the 3rd place prize in the student presentation competition at the NZSA 2009 conference that concluded yesterday in Wellington.

Brian Browning

Congratulations to Brian Browning on being awarded (as PI) a substantial grant for three years from the US National Institutes of Health Human Genome Project, Improving genotype accuracy and haplotypic analysis for genome-wide studies.

Dr Arier Lee

The Senate has approved that Arier Lee be awarded her PhD entitled Random Effects models for Ordinal Data.

Rachel Fewster receives Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award

Dr Rachel Fewster was one of ten prize winners at the July 21 awards held at Parliament. Paul Denny from Computer Science also received an award. Each receives $20,000 in recognition of tertiary teaching excellence. The national awards follow Paul's and Rachel's earlier success as recipients of University of Auckland Teaching Excellence Awards. Paul received the award for Innovation in Teaching in 2008 and Rachel received an Early Career Excellence in Teaching award in 2006.

Rachel's contribution to teaching in the Department of Statistics since 1999 has been outstanding. Rachel's unique ability and originality is evident in her approach to teaching, and in her ongoing effort to reflect on and enhance what she does. Her strength is to make the subject of Statistics accessible and understood by a wide variety of students. She has re-thought conventional approaches, and strives to ensure that all elements of her teaching practice bring to life the underlying concepts of Statistics.

[ Via John Morrow, Deputy Vice-Cancellor (Academic) ]

Ilze Ziedins

Dr Ilze Ziedins is a recipient from the Staff Research Fund in the latest FRDF funding round.

David Scott on Big Wednesday wins

Will you win the $35 million dollars available on Lotto's Big Wednesday?

Ali Ikram interviewed David Scott for the Sunrise show on TV3.

Ali: Let's face facts. In reality even though the jackpot has to go this week you've got stuff-all chance of hitting first or second division.

David Scott: The chance of buying a ticket and winning first or second division is 1 in 4 million.

Ali: And probability expert David Scott has got a good way of demonstrating what that means with the toss of a coin. My chance of winning big Wednesday is that same as if I can toss this coin and land on heads 22 times in a row.

And later after having the general public toss a coin:

Ali: The fact that the jackpot will be shared amongst lower divisions if first division isn't struck has even those who don't normally buy a Lotto ticket giving this advice.

David Scott: If you must play the lottery then this is the week to do it. If you want to increase your chances of actually winning of an amount and not having to share it with too many people then you should be looking at trying to firstly pick numbers that other people aren't going to pick.

Ali: That means choosing numbers over 31 to avoid the practice of other players who use their birthdays. But even out there on the street there's some logic you just can't argue with.

Man on Street: Unless you buy a ticket you can't win.

Chris Wild, Fellow of the ASA

Chris Wild has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Alastair Scott is the only other statistician in New Zealand who has been honoured in this way.

Dr Song

Congratulations to Sarah Song, who has satisfied the examiners of her PhD thesis, and has now been awarded her PhD.

Microarray-based gene set analysis in cancer studies; http://hdl.handle.net/2292/4239

Prof Tom Salisbury visit

Prof. Tom Salisbury (Past President of the Canadian Math. Society and former deputy director of the Fields Institute) visited the department for 3 months from January to March, working with Mark Holmes. Tom gave two excellent lectures on super-Brownian motion during his stay.

Claude McCarthy Fellowship

Jennifer Wilcock has received a 2009 Claude McCarthy Fellowships, awarded by Public Trust and the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors Committee (NZVCC). Jenny is developing methods for analysing epidemiological study data and will be using her fellowship to attend the Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC in August 2009, to present a paper on her PhD research.

These fellowships are awarded by the Public Trust and selection is carried out by the New Zealand Vice-chancellor's Committee. This year 25 projects were funded, three of which were awarded to students at the University of Auckland.

(This news was also announced in December 2008.)

Professor Keith Worsley

With much sadness we report on the death of Professor Keith Worsley, a New Zealand born statistician and member of the NZIMA's International Scientific Advisory Board. Keith discovered he had pancreatic cancer only three months ago, and died on 27th February.

(Via NZIMA.)

Keith Worsley's PhD on Significance testing in automatic interaction detection was supervised by Alastair Scott.

Two posters on his work of brain mapping can be seen in the corridor of Science Centre 303 on Level 2.

Rachel Fewster nominated for National Tertiary Teaching Excellence award

Rachel Fewster has been nominated by the University for a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence award. Rachel won a University of Auckland Teaching Excellence award in 2007.

Ross Ihaka and R in the New York Times

Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman appeared in the New York Times in a story titled Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power by Ashlee Vance.

To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, its the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attics insulation or what pirates in movies say.

R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.

Ashlee Vance published on a New York Times blog a further commentary on January 8, 2009, entitled R You Ready for R?

A follow up article was published in the Weekend Herald, entitled Academic unfazed by rock star status by Juliet Middleton.

As statistician Ross Ihaka was pottering among his tomatoes in Avondale yesterday, the influential New York Times was raving about the free, statistical computing and graphics language he developed.

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Seminars in 2009. Go back to 2008.

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