This competition, for UCLA graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, gets participants to use real student data and statistical analyses to help a nonprofit high school advance their mission of providing the highest level of education and care to their students.

More details regarding this competition can be found at this link.

Alyson Fletcher, assistant professor, and eight colleagues have launched a new annual scientific conference. It is called Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. Read about the full story here.

A paper coauthored by our Ph.D. students, Tianmin Shu and Lifeng Fan, in a joint work with Professor Hongjing Lu (joint faculty in Psychology and Statistics), received the Computational Modeling Prize, a best paper prize from the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2017 in London. Their paper is titled “Inferring Human Interaction from Motion Trajectories in Aerial Videos”.

The Design and Analysis of Experiments 2017 (DAE 2017) Conference will be held at UCLA on October 12 – 14, 2017. It is being organized by UCLA professors Hongquan Xu, Statistics and Weng Kee Wong, Biostatistics.

The purpose of the Transdisciplinary Seed Grant Program is to provide funds to foster new transdisciplinary research and scholarship between faculty members from different UCLA departments. The two priorities for the FY17 competition were north campus-led research projects and projects involving big data. The names of our winning faculty members and their projects are below:

Mark Handcock – Reducing Homelessness in LA using Big Data and Predictive Modeling
Erin Hartman – Leveraging Highly Granular Data in Sampling and Analysis of Political Surveys
Rick Schoenberg – Searching for Repeating Foreshocks by Data-mining Massive Continuous Seismic Waveforms

The American Statistical Association is looking for judges for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair on May 16 and 17.

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is the world’s premiere science competition for pre-college students. The students participating in ISEF have won in city, county, state and countrywide affiliated science fairs throughout the world. The American Statistical Association is organizing judges to examine the statistical content of the entries.

Judges are needed for Tuesday and/or Wednesday, May 16 and 17. You can choose to participate both days, or one day. You can even choose to participate for just part of the day on Tuesday. More details are available on page 4 of this link.

Send an email to Madeline Bauer if you have questions.

Congratulations to Mike Tsiang, lecturer, as the paper “Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events”, which he co-authored, has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here is a link to the paper and another link to the UCLA Newsroom article that discusses his research.

Congratulations to Tianmin Shu, Ph.D. student and member of the VCLA research group, as his research was recently profiled in New Scientist. The work taught a robot, Baxter, the subtleties of interacting with humans. The article can be found at this link.

Tianmin will be presenting his paper “Learning Social Affordance Grammar from Videos: Transferring Human Interactions to Human-Robot Interactions” at IEEE’s ICRA 2017 (International Conference on Robotics and Automation) in Singapore on May 30, 2017.

More information is available here.

Details available here.