ASC2010 Australian Statistical Conference

E K Foreman lecture
Dr Alan M Zaslavsky
(Harvard University, USA)

A key attraction of the Australian Statistical Conference 2010 will be the Ken Foreman Lecture. This lecture is sponsored by the Australian Bureau Statistics (ABS) to commemorate Ken Foreman's contribution to the development of survey methodology in Australia. In a career spanning over 30 years at the ABS, Ken introduced a wide range of statistical methods and processes that have long term impact on ABS's work. Every two years, the Ken Foreman Lecture is awarded to an overseas survey methodologist/analyst and the series has been a regular feature of ASC's. Previous speakers include Professors Jon Rao, Fiona Steele, Ray Chambers and Pedro de Silva. This year, the E. K. Foreman lecture will be by Dr Alan Zaslavsky.

Alan Zaslavsky is Professor of Health Care Policy (statistics) at the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He earned his BA degree at Harvard College, his MS at Northeastern University, and his Ph. D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Zaslavsky's statistical interests include surveys, census methodology, small-area estimation, official statistics, missing data, hierarchical modeling, and applied Bayesian methodology. His research in health care policy centre on measurement of the quality of care provided by health plans through consumer assessments and clinical and administrative data.

Among his current projects are the Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey implementation for the Medicare system, methodology for surveys in psychiatric epidemiology, centered on validation of the CIDI-A (adolescent) survey in the National Comorbidity Study-Adolescent, and studies on determinants of quality of care for cancer, including the NCI-funded CanCORS (Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance) project. Alan's talk will likely interest those who are involved with modelling of survey data, analysis of health care surveys and their policy implications. Sponsored by the Australian Bureau of Statistics

Confirmed speakers

Professor Adrian Baddeley
(University of Western Australia)
Professor Adrian Baddeley one of Australia's top statisticians. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, winner of the Pitman Medal and the Hannan Medal, he is a specialist in statistical ways of interpreting spatial and geometrical information such as microscope images of biological tissue; the spatial arrangement of animals territories, trees in a wood or copper deposits in a mining area; and spatial patterns generated by random accidents such as crystal defects in semiconductors.
If provoked, he will demonstrate principles of spatial statistics by scattering coins or rice across a table or chopping up vegetables in different ways! A very visual thinker, Professor Baddeley is also a keen photographer, specialising in underwater photography.
His most highly cited paper is in the Journal of Microscopy (unusual for a statistician). "It could be caricatured as a new way of cutting up vegetables," he said.
Professor Baddeley is very keen on statistical computing and on developing software.

Professor Tadeusz Bednarski is a statistician of some repute and with not only a wealth of technical ability, but also a deep understanding of the philosophical foundations of statistical methodology.
Tadeusz Bednarski trained amongst the Berkeley school of statisticians in California, USA, having gained his PhD with guidance from Lucien Le Cam and David Blackwell. He plays an important role amongst the Polish community of statisticians having been involved in the running of a number of International Conferences held in Poland. He is Professor of Mathematics (specialty in Statistics) at Wroclaw University and until recently Deputy Director of Economics Department of the Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics at Wroclaw University. He is known for both his clear arguments and his good sense of humour.
His main research interests are in asymptotic robust methodology, in particular in applications of Frechet differentiability to statistical inference in Poisson, Cox and time series models. From the practical standpoint his interests concern longitudinal studies of clinical data, insurance statistics, unemployment statistical studies, and econometric modelling in time series. He is the author of over 40 scientific papers and a book Mathematics for Economics.
Tadeusz Bednarski has visited Murdoch University in Western Australia on several occasions, spending at least one whole semester in Perth back in 1989.

sponsored by Murdoch University

Professor Noel Cressie
(The Ohio State University, USA)
Noel Cressie received the Bachelor of Science degree with first class honours in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia. He received the MA and PhD in Statistics from Princeton University. Dr Cressie is Professor of Statistics, Distinguished Professor of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and Director of the Program in Spatial Statistics and Environmental Statistics at The Ohio State University. His research interests are in the statistical modeling and analysis of spatial and spatio-temporal data. This has led to the development of Bayesian and empirical Bayesian methodology in complex, non-linear systems in the earth sciences, such as spatial analysis of mineral properties of soil, long-lead forecasting of the El Nino phenomenon, remote sensing of global environmental processes, and estimating ice-stream dynamics. He is the author of two books, including "Statistics for Spatial Data, rev. edn.", published by John Wiley and Sons. Dr Cressie is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and he is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He was the 2009 Fisher Lecturer awarded by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.

Professor Persi Diaconis
(Stanford University, USA)
Persi Diaconis was born into a family of professional musicians. At 14 he quit his violin lessons at Julliard after 9 years of study, and went on tour with Dai Vernon, "the greatest magician in the US." Diaconis did well doing magic, inventing tricks, giving lessons and living a "very colorful" life for 8 years until he was recommended a probability book by Feller as the best and most interesting on the subject. Diaconis bought it and then found that he couldn't read it. So he enrolled in NY City College at night, graduated two years later with a degree in mathematics and was accepted into the statistics program at Harvard. By 1974 he had earned a Ph.D. and joined the faculty of the Statistics Department at Stanford.
Diaconis' strong background in magic has proved useful in another area - catching 'psychics' cheating. Diaconis is an expert at deception and has found cheating, or failure to perform, with every psychic he has been allowed to observe. Statistics is useful for spotting the errors and fallacies in the more 'scientific' parapsychology studies: "I have read very thoroughly for ten years all of the refereed, serious parapsychology literature. There is not a single, repeatable experiment in that literature....I guess it is useful to go on record and to say that loud and clear."
In 1982, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Diaconis $40,000 a year, tax free, for 5 years. The award goes to individuals with the potential to make "substantial contributions" in some area.
Diaconis is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics. sponsored by SAS

CSIRO has arranged for Jerry Friedman who has been a pioneer in the theory and practice of computational statistics and data to attend ASC2010. Jerry has been a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University for more than 20 years and has contributed a remarkable array of topics and methodologies to data mining and machine learning. He has written many expository articles and books and given an extraordinary number of invited talks relating data mining and machine learning to statistical foundations, and developed and implemented new methodologies including CART, MARS, PRIM, PPR, MART, and Gradient Boosting He has won numerous awards for his many contributions to mathematical physics, and statistics. Jerry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the prestigious Parzen Prize which is awarded to North American statisticians who have made outstanding and influential contributions to the development of applicable and innovative statistical methods. He is also a recipient of the ACM Data Mining Lifetime Innovation Award. A number of papers written by Jerry have been recognised by Technometrics and the Journal of the American Statistical Association as Paper of the Year.

sponsored by CSIRO

Professor Denise Lievesley
(King's College London)
Professor Denise Lievesley is one of the UK's leading social statisticians, who has campaigned for evidence to be used as the basis for the development of sound public policies within the UK, She is currently the new Head of School at King's College London.
Having enjoyed a distinguished career, her posts have included founding Chief Executive of the English Information Centre for Health and Social Care, Director of Statistics at UNESCO -where she established its new Institute for Statistics, and Director of the UK Data Archive (and simultaneously Professor of Research Methods in the Mathematics Department, University of Essex). Most recently Denise was a special advisor at the African Centre for Statistics of the UN and was based in Addis Ababa.
Professor Lievesley's various roles have led her to work with ministers, ambassadors, senior civil servants and officials of international agencies, for which she has established a reputation for upholding the principles of professional integrity, policy relevance and methodological transparency. Throughout her working life, Professor Lievesley has been committed to protecting the integrity of official statistics and to ensure that they remain free from political influence.
Her expertise and ability has been recognised with her election as President of the Royal Statistical Society (1999-2001) and of the International Statistical Institute (2007-9), the first ever woman to hold this office. Through these roles she has contributed to the formulation of both national and international policy on both statistics and evidence-based policy, and remains active in the development of social research methods and in research ethics. sponsored by SAS

Professor Delia North
(University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa)
Delia has over 25 years experience in teaching statistics across disciplines and levels in universities. Over the years she has become increasingly interested in statistics education, which resulted in her being appointed as the local chair of the 6th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS6) which was held in Cape Town, South Africa, in July 2002. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the South African Statistical Association (SASA) for more than ten years and has been chair of the Education Committee of SASA since 2003. Delia is very actively involved with voluntary work, conducting various outreach activities relating to the introduction of Statistics into the school syllabus for the first time ever in South Africa. She is known internationally for her work in supporting South African teachers.

Dr Gordon Smyth (WEHI, Melbourne)
Gordon Smyth is highly thought of in the Australian Statistics Community for his contributions to biostatistics but more importantly for his work in bioinformatics. He is a laboratory head at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, and excited about the prospect of disseminating his recent research at ASC2010. The research of his group focuses on the analysis of gene expression data from a variety of genomic technologies including microarrays and RNA-seq Next Generation sequencing. His current interests include molecular pathway identification and Gene Set Enrichment Analysis for the sort of small but complex microarray experiments which arise in experimental medicine. His work blends theory and application in equal measure, and he has been a member of the Bioconductor core development team, providing a key open source software tool for bioinformatics. Currently Gordon and colleagues are working to identify the "Cell of Origin" for the most dangerous types of breast cancer and to find possible gene targets for drug intervention. Other projects include using gene expression signatures for individual patient prognosis in ovarian cancer and the molecular characterization of early multiple sclerosis.
Gordon created and maintains the StatSci.org website, which includes announcements of Statistics Jobs in Australian and New Zealand and many more things including information about his bioinformatics research (http://www.statsci.org/smyth/research.html).

Professor Chris Wild
(University of Auckland, NZ)
Also OZCOTS Keynote Speaker
Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and recognised by Fellowships of the American Statistical Association and the Royal Society of New Zealand, Chris Wild is a member of a rare crossover species. He publishes extensively in statistical methodology, particularly on response-selective and missing data problems, but also works substantively in statistics education. He co-wrote the Wiley books Nonlinear Regression (1989) and Chance Encounters (2000) with George Seber. His best known statistics education paper is Statistical Thinking in Empirical Enquiry with Maxine Pfannkuch (1999, International Statistical Review). Chris' interests in statistics education include curricular revolution at school levels, growing university statistics programmes, and improving the penetration, quality and practical impact of statistics education at all levels. Chris has been a Council member of the International Statistical Institute, President of the International Association for Statistics Education and an Associate Editor of the International Statistical Review, Biometrics, the Statistics Education Research Journal, and ANZJS. He was Head of Auckland's Department of Statistics 2003-2007 and co-led the University of Auckland's first-year statistics teaching team to a national teaching award in 2003. His keynote addresses include the Royal Statistical Society, the Statistical Society of Canada, and ICOTS.

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