Congratulations to Assistant Professor Karen McKinnon who has been awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER award for her research on heat extremes. This award will support her efforts in this area with more than $944,000 over a five-year period.

More details on this story are available in this UCLA Newsroom article.

The actual NSF award is documented here.

Jeremy Guinta, MAS 2018, works as the managing director of consulting firm Ankura’s Los Angeles office. His professional work includes advising trial attorneys, litigators and expert testifiers by using his statistical expertise to aid with data management, complex data analysis and calculation of damages. For years he also has been involved in ASA DataFest^TM at UCLA as a mentor, judge and sponsor.

More information can be found here.

The Semel Healthy Campus Initiative (HCI) Eudaimonia Award is a recognition given annually to members of the UCLA community who exemplify a life full of purpose and meaning. “Connectors” is this year’s theme. Awardees have demonstrated a commitment to bringing good to society, and building up community members through care, service and advocacy.

Mike and Nicolas will accept their awards in a ceremony happening on May 1.

We are pleased to announce the Generative AI for Healthcare Workshop at UCLA on April 19th, 2024. This one-day workshop is hosted by the UCLA Department of Statistics and sponsored by UCLA College Luskin Lecture. It will be held in the Laureate Room (1st floor) at the UCLA Luskin Conference Hotel.

About

Generative AI holds profound significance for healthcare by revolutionizing various aspects of medical research, diagnostics, and patient care. Its capacity to generate realistic and diverse data allows for the creation of synthetic datasets that augment the limited availability of real-world patient information, facilitating the development and validation of robust machine learning models. In this workshop, we will discuss two main pillars in healthcare AI: “trustworthiness” and “interpretability”. In the realm of healthcare, where data privacy and ethical considerations are paramount, the generation of synthetic electronic health records (EHRs) not only enhances trustworthiness by preserving individual privacy but also underscores the critical role of interpretability in ensuring transparent decision-making processes, particularly within medical applications. The workshop brings together a diverse community of generative AI researchers from various disciplines, including statistics, machine learning, and computer science, along with policymakers and industrial partners. Please join us on April 19 for this great event in the Luskin Hotel. Registration is required but free.

Program

All events will be held at UCLA Luskin Conference Hotel, Laureate Room (1st floor).
Lunch will be provided at Legacy Room (2nd floor).

April 19th, Friday

• 8-8:50 Register
• 8:50-9 Opening Remark
• 9-9:45 Keynote Talk by Eran Halperin (UCLA/United Health)
• 9:45-10:15 Poster/Coffee/Tea
• 10:15-12:15 Invited Session 1: TBD
  Session Chair: TBD
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: Jacob Aptekar (Medidata)
    Slides: TBD
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: Quanquan Gu (UCLA)
    Slides: TBD
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: TBD
    Slides: TBD
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: TBD
    Slides: TBD
• 12:15-13:30 Lunch
• 13:30-14:15 Keynote Talk by Ramesh Durvasula (Eli Lilly)
  Title: TBD
  Chair: TBD
• 14:15-14:45 Poster/Coffee/Tea
• 14:45-16:45 Invited Session 2: TBD
  Session Chair: TBD
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: Haoda Fu (Eli Lilly)
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: Qi Liu (FDA)
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: Xiaofeng Lin (UCLA)
    Slides: TBD
  • Title: TBD
    Speaker: Sheng Wang (University of Washington)
    Slides: TBD
• 16:45-17:00 Closing workshop

Poster

It is strongly encouraged to upload your poster in the registration link below (deadline is April 1st). You need to bring posters to the conference site to setup. The poster exhibit time is from 9:40-17:00.

Registration (Deadline April 1st, 2024) No Registration Fee.

CLICK HERE for registration.

Accommodation

If you need accommodation, nearby options include the following local hotels.

• UCLA Meyer & Renee Luskin Conference Center
• UCLA Guest House
• Palihotel Westwood Village
• Royal Palace Westwood
• W Los Angeles Westwood

Organizers

• Guang Cheng, UCLA Statistics (Chair)
• Namjoon Suh, UCLA Statistics
• Robert Tilman, Optum AI
• Qing Zhou, UCLA Statistics

Contact

For more information contact guangcheng@ucla.edu.

Workshop in 2023

In 2023, we held a workshop on synthetic data generation.
For those who are interested, link is HERE!

Their efforts introduced two new approaches to better optimize drug design. Read more about the details here.

Congratulations to Gizella Wade for publishing her report on differential access to advanced mathematics. The details are here.

The Department of Statistics and Data Science and the Department of Biostatistics hosted this seminar celebrating the 50th anniversary of Tom Ferguson’s seminal research paper, “A Bayesian Analysis of Some Nonparametric Problems” at the Alumni Center. Professors Igor Prünster, Peter Müller and Wesley Johnson spoke at the event. More details of their talks are available at this link which shows the flyer that advertises the seminar. The seminar was streamed live through a Zoom webinar that was sponsored by Bayesian Nonparametrics Section of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). A recording of it is below.

A cocktail reception followed the seminar. This was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of our department. Our faculty, students, staff and alumni mixed. At the reception many people reconnected with friends and colleagues from past years.

Our colleague Dr. Michael Tsiang has been featured in the latest Amstat News magazine with a mention on the cover! In the article he discusses the Michael Tsiang Fund for Belonging in Statistics, his reasons for starting it, its purpose, and ways to contribute to it.

You can read the article at this link. Thank you Michael for the excellent work!

The Overton Prize was established by the ISCB in memory of G. Christian Overton in 2000. The annual prize is considered the highest honor for a computational biology scientist in the early to mid-career stage (up to a decade post-degree or equivalent experience), who has already made a significant contribution to the field of computational biology. More information about the award can be found at https://www.iscb.org/iscb-awards/overton-prize

Congratulations to Jessica for winning another prestigious award!

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) named Dr. Jiashen You as the agency’s new Chief Data Officer and head of its Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA) on 04/10/2023:

https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/jiashen-you-named-new-chief-data-officer-eeoc

Dr. You’s duties will include ensuring that enterprise data are available, reliable, consistent, accessible, secure and timely to support the mission and activities of the federal agency. In addition, the chief data officer chairs the EEOC Data Governance Board and manages the open government data effort, such as how the EEOC creates and makes available public data products.

Dr. You received his Ph.D. in Statistics from UCLA in 2012.   Congratulations to Dr. You for this distinguished achievement!

Professor Jessica Li won one of the 2023 COPSS Emerging Leader Awards. Jessica was selected as a winner for innovative and disruptive research at the junction of statistics and biology, especially in statistical genomics; for advocacy of the importance of statistical rigor in the biomedical science community; and for outreach efforts and commitment to improving the diversity in quantitative research.

Congratulations to Jessica for winning another prestigious award!

The UCLA synthetic data workshop will be happening from April 13-14, 2023 at the Faculty Club. It is hosted by UCLA Statistics and co-sponsored by IDRE, Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence, ASA Section on Statistical Computing, NISS and NSF. More details are available here.

Download Synthetic Data Workshop Flyer

A daylong celebration of the life of Don Ylvisaker will be happening on Saturday, March 18, 2023. Details are available here.

Dr. Jingyi Jessica Li has been promoted to Full Professor, effective July 1, 2022.

Dr. Li has joint appointments in the Departments of Statistics, Biostatistics, Computational Medicine, and Human Genetics. Her research focuses on developing rigorous, robust, interpretable, and efficient statistical methods to address important questions in biomedical sciences, especially those around high-throughput genomic studies. The significance of her work’s impact is evident from her success in developing widely-used bioinformatics tools to advance transcriptomics studies at tissue and single-cell levels, and publications in influential journals such as Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, Nature Communications, Science Advances, and Genome Biology. Dr. Li’s talent and achievements have been recognized with multiple awards, including an NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Math Scholar Award from the Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Program, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 China, and Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship.

Please congratulate Jessica for her promotion!

Aspiring data scientists, you are invited to attend the in-person panel discussion happening during the evening of Thursday, November 17, 2022 at the James West Alumni Center. Learn from real-world practitioners. Details are here.

Statistica Sinica featured their latest special issue on sliced inverse regression (SIR) to honor Ker-Chau Li for his ground-breaking contributions to dimension-reduction techniques in high-dimensional statistics. Over his career Professor Li also made substantial contributions in mathematics / computational statistics, high-dimensional data analysis, bioinformatics, systems biology, and applied research. Li served as a Co-editor of Statistica Sinica, 1999-2002, and as the Director of the Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, 2006-2012. He was elected as Academician of Academia Sinica in 2012, and subsequently as a member to the World Academy of Sciences in 2014. He was also the founder of the Mathematics in Biology Lab at the Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica. The special issue is available here.

Please congratulate Kerchau when you next see him.

Guido has joint appointments in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Mathematics. His research focuses on the theoretical analysis of machine learning and artificial intelligence. His work provides insight into why these methods work so well, rather than the engineering of more refined methods. He was the recipient of the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

There are few things more important to a department than the development and promotion of junior faculty.

Congratulations to Guido for his tenure promotion!

A multi-campus, multi-disciplinary UC team have been awarded $1 million from the National Science Foundation to plan a new center to prevent and rapidly contain disease outbreaks and their negative effects on health, the economy and society. See this link for more details.

Professor Mark S. Handcock is only statistician on the team.

Congratulations to Mark!

Dr. Jingyi Jessica Li received an inaugural funding, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative Single-Cell Biology Data Insights Award. Her project is “Enhancing Rigor and Reliability of Single-Cell Data Science.” Her team will address the widespread issue of inflated false discovery rates (FDRs) in single-cell data analysis, in particular, the data reuse “double-dipping” issue. Her team will also develop a versatile simulator to generate realistic single-cell multi-omics data and spatial transcriptomics data with ground truths, thus allowing the single-cell community to perform fair and informative benchmarking of computational tools.

More details are available here:
https://chanzuckerberg.com/science/programs-resources/single-cell-biology/data-insights/enhancing-rigor-and-reliability-of-single-cell-data-science/

Congratulations to Jessica for winning another prestigious award!

Jingyi Jessica Li, Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at UCLA, was selected to be a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (Helen Putnam Fellow) for the 2022-2023 academic year.

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program, now in its 22nd year, offers scholars and practitioners in the arts, humanities, journalism, sciences, and social sciences a chance to pursue their latest passions. This year, the program traditionally accepted only 50 fellows for the 2022-2023 class from across Harvard University and around the world. The historical acceptance rate in recent years was below 3%.

Dr. Li is an interdisciplinary expert in statistics and genomics. During her Radcliffe Fellowship year, she will write the first book to clarify common confusions in genomics data analysis by connecting cutting-edge genomics research questions with fundamental statistical and machine-learning methods, focusing on the distinctions and choices among the methods—which are apparently similar but fundamentally different—so that quantitative genomics researchers will have clear guidelines to follow in their development of bioinformatics tools.

Link to Dr. Li’s webpage on the Radcliffe Institute website: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/jingyi-jessica-li

Congratulations to Jessica!

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.

A daylong celebration of the life of Don Ylvisaker happened on Saturday, March 18, 2023.

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.

The story on this research is posted in the UCLA Newsroom here.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) models, through explanations, aim at making the underlying inference mechanism of AI systems transparent and interpretable to human users. Humans can easily be overwhelmed with too many or too detailed explanations; interactive communication process help in understanding the user and identify user-specific content for explanation, says Song-Chun Zhu, the project’s principal investigator and a professor of Statistics and Computer Science. So Zhu and his team set out to improve existing XAI models – to pose the explanation generation as an iterative process of communication between the human and the machine.

Arjun Reddy Akula, Ph.D. candidate at UCLA who led this work, said “In our framework, we let the machine and the user solve a collaborative task, but the machine’s mind and the human user’s mind only have a partial knowledge of the environment. Hence, the machine and user need to communicate with each other, using their partial knowledge, otherwise they would not be able to optimally solve the collaborative task”. He also said, “Our work will make it easier for non-expert AI human users to operate and understand the AI based systems”.

This work has been published in the prestigious Science journal and can be accessed here: https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(21)01551-0.pdf

Professor Karen McKinnon was named as a 2021 Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering. This year’s class features 20 innovative early-career scientists and engineers, who will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research. Professor McKinnon uses the tools of climate dynamics, statistics, and machine learning to describe, understand, and predict climate variability with the goal of reducing uncertainty about the future climate.

You can read more, and meet the other Packard Fellows, at this link.

Please join me congratulating Professor McKinnon for receiving the prestigious Packard Fellowship.

Arash’s research is primarily in statistical machine learning, in particular, inference on network data, high-dimensional statistics, graphical models and convex optimization.

Chad has joint appointments in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Political Science. His work in statistics focuses on causal inference and machine learning methods.

Both promotions are effective July 1, 2021 and come with tenure. Please congratulate Arash and Chad for their tenure promotions.

Greg was commended for his “invaluable participation and methodology” and his “knowledge, time, and creativity to design the best system” as quoted by (our MAS Industry partner), the LDC Inc.’s Executive President, Ana Valdez. You can find the 2021 LDC Media Report on this webpage.

Professor Karen McKinnon published a paper in Nature Climate Change last week, Hot extremes have become drier in the United States Southwest, identifying an unexpected decrease in summertime specific humidity on the hottest days in the US Southwest over the past 70 years, and particularly since 2000. Her findings indicate that the primary source of atmospheric moisture on hot days is soil moisture, so the observed decrease in humidity is a consequence of the ongoing drought. The results are, unfortunately, bad news for wildfire risk in the region, since a dry atmosphere both desiccates the vegetation and can cause more rapid wildfire spread. The work has been covered in the LATimes and NYTimes.

This debate happened on May 19, 2021. More details as well as a recording of it are available at this link.

In Memoriam: Professor Janice Reiff, a joint faculty member in our department and in History, died unexpectedly on May 4, 2021. She was active across UCLA, widely known, and will be deeply missed. More details about her are available here.

Professor Jingyi Jessica Li has received the MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Award. The award cites her outstanding contributions for improving the scientificity and transparency of data analysis, including the Central Dogma. The Central Dogma refers to the process of DNA making mRNAs and mRNAs making proteins, one of the most fundamental principles in modern biological sciences. More details are available here.

The MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 is an annual list that recognizes outstanding innovators who are younger than 35. The awards span a wide range of fields, including biotechnology, materials, computer hardware, energy, transportation, communications, and the Internet.

Recognition by MIT Technology Review gives these young people a platform to present themselves and their achievements to industry leaders, academic experts, and the global public. Each year, brilliant men and women are recognized for their advancements in diverse technical fields including biotechnology and medicine, computer and electronics hardware, software, internet, artificial intelligence, robotics, telecommunications, nanotechnology and materials, energy, and transportation.

Congratulations to Professor Jingyi Jessica Li for winning this prestigious award!

Professor Kenneth Lange has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.  Professor Lange is the Rosenfeld Professor of Computational Genetics, Professor of Computational Medicine, Human Genetics and Statistics.

Professor Lange has written four advanced textbooks and published more than 200 scientific papers in the areas of genetic epidemiology, population genetics, membrane physiology, demography, oncology, medical imaging, stochastic processes and optimization theory. Many of his landmark papers predate by a decade or more the current flood of biological applications of hidden Markov chains, Markov chain Monte Carlo and high-dimensional optimization, which are used to analyze patterns in data and can have predictive value.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that provides scientific advice to the federal government and other organizations. Professor Lange is the only UCLA faculty member elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year.  UCLA now has 55 faculty members in the academy according to UCLA Newsroom (April 30, 2021).

Congratulations to Professor Kenneth Lange on this distinguished honor! More details are available at this UCLA Newsroom link.

The UCLA Integrated Data Science Training in Cardiovascular Medicine (iDISCOVER) Program supports graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who seek training at the intersection of data science and cardiovascular (CV) medicine.

Heather’s current research project investigates the validity of approaches to account for hidden factors in expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) studies. The iDISCOVER Program will be a great opportunity for her to examine the implications of her research on cardiovascular data science applications.

More information about the fellowship is available at this link.

Our Ph.D. alumnus, Jake Porway, host of National Geographic’s show “The Numbers Game“, was interviewed for Amstat News in December 2020. Please see the details of this interview at this link.

Professor Arash Amini received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) DMS (Division of Mathematical Sciences) CAREER Award. This supports his outstanding research and education activities in High-Dimensional Statistical Models for Unsupervised Learning. The project will advance the field of modeling big complex unlabeled data. The focus will be on learning from network data as well as learning dependency structures from regular data. The NSF CAREER award, with a total of $400,000 for a 5-year duration, is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

For more information, please see this link.

Congratulations to Professor Arash Amini for receiving this prestigious award!

Professor Mahtash Esfandiari was selected as the winner of the Inaugural Physical Science Centennial Excellence in Education Award. This award recognizes a faculty member for making a broad impact on classroom inclusivity and learning excellence. As the primary architect and co-director of the capstone course, and pioneering the first diversity course in the division, Mahtash has demonstrated the ability to inspire collaboration, as well as making many contributions to help establish an inclusive learning community at UCLA.

We congratulate Mahtash for winning this award and thank her for the huge impact that she made in diversity education in the UCLA Department of Statistics.

Two teams of graduating seniors recently completed their Statistics capstone course. They did an outstanding job. They worked under the supervision of Professor Mahtash Esfandiari and Professor Vivian Lew. Samuel Baugh was their teaching assistant.

The first group produced a real-time updating dashboard app that tracks the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Using publicly available data from “Google Community Mobility Reports” and “The COVID Tracking Project”, the dashboard shows the behavior of citizen mobility and COVID-19 test and patient outcomes in different states for different time intervals. Please see their website and dashboard in action.

The students in this first team are Brielle Josephine Balswick, Adrika Chakraborty, Valerie Jiaying Chen, Shirley Mach, Josh (Jungsoo) Park, Julia Sho Sung, Cydney Joy Vicentina, Anika Vij and Jericho Neo Ranches Villareal.

The second group created a simulation dashboard app, using a SIRU epidemiological model for each state in the U.S. While accounting for potential unreported cases, this dashboard presents the spread of COVID-19 and its susceptibility to the implementation of government interference. They produced a video that explains the details.

The students in the second team are Keith Atienza, Isabela Devia, Valeria Monserrat Lopez Robles, Rachel Theresa Rusch, Michael Anthony Stranieri, Lucas (Yoo Jeong) Han, Jianzhen Wang, Yixin Xu and Fanru Zhao.

Professor Jingyi Jessica Li was interviewed by Robyn Williams on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “The Science Show”. She talked about “Genomic processes described using biology and statistics”. The podcast was broadcast on May 23, 2020. It is available here.

Professor Rob Gould has received the 2020 ASA Outstanding Chapter Service Award from the Southern California Chapter of ASA (SCASA). The award is for Rob’s “outstanding leadership, committed mentoring, innovative teaching and dedicated service to the Chapter. For never stopping thinking of new and innovative ways to bring Statistics and Data Science to the whole world, and for caring enough to entice the statistical community to spread the word”! Last year, Rob received the 2019 Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award from the ASA and the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award in Statistics Education from the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics and Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education.

Please congratulate Rob for winning another distinguished award!

Please congratulate Laurie for being recognized for the outstanding resource that she contributes to our student community. See the article at this link.

Professor Karen McKinnon was recently awarded an NSF grant through the Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics program. The grant, titled “The factors governing daily near-surface air temperature variability over land”, is focused on using both statistical and dynamical models to better identify the dominant causal mechanisms underlying regional temperature variability and high-impact extreme events. More information can be found at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1939988.

Please congratulate Karen on her outstanding achievement!

Her project title is “Discovering Fundamental Mechanisms of Translational Control to Advance mRNA Therapeutics and other Biomedical Technologies.” The strategic vision of the W. M. Keck Foundation Junior Faculty Awards is to support outstanding early career scientists with a $500,000 grant ($250,000 per year for two years) to pursue creative and impactful research. For detailed information of this award, please see this link.

Please congratulate Jessica on her outstanding achievement!

Congratulations to Professor Jingyi “Jessica” Li and her research group, the Junction of Statistics and Biology. They developed a new statistical method called AIDE. The method recovers full-length sequences of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules from data generated by second-generation RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology.

More details are available at this link:

https://www.physicalsciences.ucla.edu/development-of-new-statistical-method-likely-to-produce-insights-into-human-diseases/

Professor Rob Gould, along with Suyen Machado and Annamarie Francoise from UCLA’s Center X, were awarded a grant from the College Futures Foundation to support the continued development of the Mobilize Introduction to Data Science (IDS) high school course. IDS is the first course of its kind and is currently taught in 15 districts and 45 high schools. To date, over 9,500 students, the vast majority of whom come from communities underrepresented in STEM, have taken IDS and learned to analyze data using R. IDS was recently featured in the Freakonomics Podcast Episode 391 (http://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum). The College Futures Foundation is a non-profit organization that seeks to catalyze systemic change, increase college degree completion, and close equity gaps in education.

Congratulations to Rob and his team!

This traineeship focuses on training and mentoring graduate students in interdisciplinary research related to ModEling and uNdersTanding human behaviOR (MENTOR), at the intersection of data science, mathematics, cryptography, artificial intelligence, genomics, behavior science, and social science.

This prestigious award will cover tuition and provide a full stipend to Heather for 12 months. More details are available at this link.

We are happy to report that Jessica Li and Allie Fletcher have both been promoted to Associate Professor. Both promotions are effective July 1, 2019 and come with tenure.

Allie Fletcher’s work is interdisciplinary between applied mathematics, statistics, computer sciences, and electrical engineering. She brings a theoretician perspective to signal processing and high-dimensional inference, especially in sparse recovery and computational neuroscience. She has joint appointments in Mathematics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, as well as the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at University of California, Berkeley.

Jessica Li’s work is on the interface between statistics and biology, especially computational biology. She has joint appointments in Statistics, Biomathematics, and Human Genetics, as well as her role in the new Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program in Bioinformatics.

Both Allie and Jessica are exceptional scientists and show how statisticians are advancing science across the university. They bring statistical ideas to other fields and bring back to our discipline novel ideas that enrich us.

Please join us in congratulating Allie and Jessica!

Please congratulate our very own Allie Fletcher. She has just been named a 2019–2020 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Fletcher joins more than 50 women and men in the incoming fellowship class as they pursue work across the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program has rapidly become one of the most competitive programs of its kind in the world, with an acceptance rate of only 4 percent each year.

More details about this fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute are available at this link. There is a UCLA Newsroom article about this story at this link with more details as well.

Parthe Pandit and Mojtaba Sahraee, both Ph.D. students from Professor Allie Fletcher’s research group, received a Jack Keil Wolf Student Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT).  The IEEE ISIT is the premier conference in information theory, and the paper from Professor Fletcher’s group was selected from over 630 accepted manuscripts. More details about this award are found at this link.

The paper, “Asymptotics of MAP Inference in Deep Networks,” provides a powerful new tool for understanding reconstruction in systems with deep generative networks as priors. Such deep generative models have had enormous practical success in problems with complex data. Congratulations to Parthe and Mojtaba!

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recruits high-potential, early-career scientists and engineers and supports their graduate research training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. GRFP provides three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period and cost-of-education allowance to the graduate institution.

Sydney, Gabriel and Stephanie are second year Ph.D. students. Sydney is working on falsification testing with Professor Erin Hartman, Gabriel is working on causal order estimation of Bayesian networks with Professors Zhou and Amini, while Stephanie Stacy is working on cognition related questions with Professor Tao Gao.

It is a great honor for the department as we received 3 of the 13 awards given nationwide in the discipline of Statistics.

More details about the fellowship are found at this link.

Congratulations to Professor Song-Chun Zhu and many members of his research group, VCLA, who helped to host and organize CVPR 2019 from June 16 to June 20, 2019 in Long Beach. CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) 2019 is the premier annual computer vision event. There were 9,000+ registered attendees from 68 countries and 180+ companies as exhibitors.

Details about this conference are available at link 1 and link 2.

Hongquan Xu has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The IMS Fellowship honors the outstanding research and professional contributions of its members. The decision to grant this honor to an IMS member is based on the member’s demonstrated distinction in research in statistics or probability. Each Fellow nominee is assessed by a committee of their peers for the award. Only about one-half of one percent of the IMS membership receive this honor each year.

Judea Pearl has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). The decision to grant this honor to an ASA member is based on the member’s contribution to the field of statistics, the ASA and society at large. This is very rare as only about one-third of one percent of the ASA membership receive this honor each year.

Rob Gould has been awarded the 2019 Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award by the American Statistical Association (ASA). The Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award recognizes an individual for sustained excellence in teaching and statistics education (for a minimum of 20 years). This very prestigious award is given to at most one person per year by the ASA.

Congratulations to Hongquan, Judea and Rob!

The 2019 De Leeuw Seminar happened first. Roger Peng, Professor of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University (and a Ph.D. alumnus of ours) spoke on “The New Future of Data Analysis”. A recording of his talk is below:

Following that many of the faculty who were instrumental in the formation of our department spoke of the many steps and challenges that were overcome in order for it to form. Audience members (alumni, current students and staff) shared what the department has meant to them as well. Gifts and appreciation were conferred to retiring Student Affairs Officer Glenda Jones. This most-loved department member served us for over a decade and will be missed by all. Best wishes were given to her as she enters this new stage of her life. A recording of this portion of the evening is below:

The event ended with a cocktail reception in the lobby of CNSI where the departmental community and alumni mixed. Many people reconnected with friends and colleagues from past years.

We are pleased to announce the spring speaker for the Distinguished Women in Statistics Lecture Series: Dr. Jennie E. Brand, Professor of Sociology and Statistics at UCLA. She will present on May 6th at 4:30 pm in the Sierra Room of the Faculty Center, dinner will be held around 6 pm.

Click this link for more details and to RSVP for the talk and post-seminar dinner by April 26th.

The 2019 De Leeuw Seminar will be happening from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. The details concerning it are available on our Seminars webpage. Please RSVP here for this seminar. A flyer for the seminar is available here. It will be followed by a reception in the CNSI lobby. From 6:00pm – 7:30pm we will have our 20th Anniversary Celebration. All department members have been invited as well as our alumni. At this event we will hear from some community members, including Jan himself. All will have an opportunity to talk about the department. The day ends with a cocktail reception in the lobby of CNSI where the the departmental community and alumni can mix. Please click here to RSVP for the 20th Anniversary Celebration.

On Sunday, November 4 our department participated in the 10th annual “Exploring Your Universe” event at UCLA. We thank our volunteers Stephanie Stacy, Sydney Kahmann, Wei Li, Yidan Sun, and Sam Baugh who fascinated a future generation of statisticians. Our booth had more than 200 visitors. Kudos to Stephen Smith who developed the Shiny app for computing M&Ms proportions. We gave more than 180 M&M bags away!

The special volume is accessible at this link.

It is with deep sadness that we share the passing of Sean E. Wang, who died May 23, 2018 after a brief illness. Sean was a well known and liked alumni of our department. He received his doctorate in 2013 after completing BS and MS degrees in Mathematics at UCLA. He has been present as an alumni, participating in DataFest, seminars and other activities. He was also a committed Bruin, attending sports events and evangelized for the university and its mission.

A memorial will be held on Friday, June 15th in Whittier.

Sean’s parents, TJ and Shean Wang, shared the following message:

“We are very comforted, touched and grateful after seeing so many online memories shared by Sean’s friends. As Sean’s parents, we know him mostly as a dear son with lots of his own persistence and style. We want him to enjoy life in his own way and have a positive impact on his friends and communities. It seems that he did, in his short 38 years of life. We are very sad but feel grateful, too. We know that many of his friends are concerned about what happened. We only have limited information. Sean left us without warning. … We believe he passed away of heart failure on 5/19, but we are still waiting for the coroner’s official report. We sincerely welcome his friends come to say goodbye to him. We do not have any dress code, except no shorts and no reddish clothes please. Blue and gold, UCLA T-shirts, etc. are very much appreciated. We are planning to set up a memorial scholarship fund with the UCLA Statistics Department, a good suggestion from some of you.”

Here is information on the memorial on Friday, June 15th in Whittier:

http://obits.dignitymemorial.com/dignity-memorial/obituary.aspx?n=Sean-Wang&lc=1230&pid=189140089&mid=7861667

More information on the impact Sean had can be found at:

http://dailybruin.com/2018/05/31/alumnus-remembered-for-his-love-for-ucla-passion-for-politics/

There are also memorial threads for the various groups that Sean contributed to.

Those who had the good fortune to know Sean also know how much he will be missed.

Ph.D. alumnus and affiliated faculty member Ariana Anderson lead a team of researchers to create an app called ChatterBaby. That app uses artificial intelligence to interpret a baby’s cry based on its sound frequencies and the patterns of sounds / silence in it. It can identify whether a cry is due to fussiness, hunger or pain. This is helpful for parents who are deaf and parents / caregivers who do not understand what a baby is trying to communicate. ChatterBaby is also being used to collect data to see if crying can be used as a tool to diagnose autism. More details of this story are available from this UCLA Newsroom article and from this Wired article.

Professor Song-Chun Zhu is part of the University of Virginia’s new $27.5M Center on Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory (CRISP) It is one of six Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP) centers nationwide that are managed by the Semiconductor Research Corporation with cost-sharing from DARPA. Each research center will examine a different challenge in advancing microelectronics—a field that is crucial to the U.S. economy and its national defense. The six JUMP centers are located at the University of Virginia, UC Santa Barbara, Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, University of Michigan and Notre Dame.

UV’s CRISP Center will bring together researchers from eight universities in an effort to remove the separation between memories that store data and processors that operate on that data — a separation that has been part of all mainstream computing architectures since 1945 when von Neumann first outlined how programmable computers should be structured. Unfortunately, that technology led to today’s “memory wall” in which data access has become a major performance bottleneck. Professor Zhu, along with his colleague Jason Cong (CS), will work with CRISP researchers and become instrumental in removing that bottleneck.

Congratulations to faculty member Jingyi Jessica Li who is an inaugural winner of the Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM²D (WiSTEM²D) Scholars Award. Recipients of this prize are outstanding women at significant points in their research careers in the disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Manufacturing and Design (STEM²D). Jessica will receive $150,000 in funding and three years of mentorship from Johnson & Johnson leaders as well as members of the award’s Advisory Board. Details of the announcement are available at this link. A profile of Jessica and those of the other winners are available here.

More information is available here.

The Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award is funded from a gift endowment established by the late Edward A. Dickson, Regent of the University of California, to honor outstanding research, scholarly work, teaching, and service performed by an Emeritus or Emerita Professor since retirement. Professor Emeritus Judea Pearl was one of three selected for this award which will be presented at the UCLA Emeriti Association annual dinner.

Since his retirement, in July 1994, Dr. Pearl’s research accomplishments have increased markedly, both in volume and in impact, resulting in hundreds of scientific articles, 13 Ph.D. graduates, two seminal books, many accolades and numerous awards. In particular, his recent work on causal inference has revolutionized the way scientists in almost every discipline view and process cause-effect relationships in their respective fields. More details are available at this link.

We are currently recruiting faculty. More details are available here.

Congratulations to faculty member Jingyi Jessica Li who has been awarded a 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. This very prestigious fellowship is awarded to early-career scholars who represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Fellows receive a $65,000 award to support their research. More details are available here.

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.