We’re deeply saddened to announce the passing of Don Ylvisaker. Don was instrumental in establishing the Department of Statistics and was a great friend, mentor, and colleague to many of us. We are preparing a special In Memoriam page as well as a full obituary to honor Don’s lasting contributions to our community, which we hope to share with you very soon.

Don is preceded in death by his son Peter, and sisters Mary and Sylvia. He is survived by his wife Anna (Ricci), sisters Elisabeth and Shirley, as well as many nieces, nephews and cousins.

The family would like donations in Don’s memory to be made to VNA Health at 509 E. Montecito Street, Suite 200, Santa Barbara, CA 93103.

More details are available here.

The UCLA Introduction to Data Science (IDS) Project of Center X and the Department of Statistics is proud to announce generous funding from Valhalla Foundation to expand the IDS mission to improve data literacy for K-12 students and to increase diversity in STEM education.

For information about the Introduction to Data Science Project, please see http://introdatascience.org.

Montúfar, who leads the Mathematical Machine Learning Group — centered at UCLA and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, in Germany — works on deep learning theory and mathematical machine learning. Through investigations of the geometry of data, hypothesis functions and parameters, he and his team are developing the mathematical foundations of deep learning and improving learning with neural networks. Montúfar is the recipient of a starting grant from the European Research Council and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and he serves as research mentor with the Latinx Mathematicians Research Community. He and his team have organized a weekly online math machine learning seminar since 2020.

Please join me to congratulate Guido for receiving the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship!

Read more details at this link from the UCLA Newsroom.