Student Seminar@Stat MSU, Fall 2013
Details
Time: 4:30pm-6:00pm Wednesday.
Location: C405 Wells Hall (except as noted)
Food served at C405 Wells Hall.
Expectations
"Data Scientist is just a sexed up term for Statistician. Just do good work and call yourself whatever you want."
------Nate Silver @JSM2013
As the 2013 COPSS Fisher lecture, "From Fisher to Big Data", given by Professor Peter J. Bickel suggested, we are in the "Big Data" age. And as Hal Varian, chief economist at Google said, "the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians". Here "statisticians" are not just referred to people in Statistics department, instead, they are generally "Data Scientists", who can apply modern statistical methods to do data analysis to get knowledge from the massive data from various areas. Nowadays, Machine Learning, Graphical Models, Computational Bayesian Analysis and other methods are becoming more and more popular among "Data Scientists", with applications in Engineering, Computational Biology, Finance, Social Science and so on. And it's also easy for us to get real data online such as Kaggle, which is a famous website for data analysis competitions, whose data are provided by many large companies such as Facebook.
In our department, professors are working on lots of different areas and they have a variety of interests. Professor Hira Koul is working on inference on Stochastic Processes and non- or semi-parametric inference. Professor R.V.Ramamoorthi is working on Graphical Models and Nonparametric Bayesian Analysis. Professor Yuehua Cui is interested in lots of statistical models such as varying coefficient models with applications in Biology, especially in Genetics. Professor Ping-Shou Zhong is working on Empirical likelihood methods and high dimensional inference. Professor Yimin Xiao is working on lots of areas, especially in Random Fields and Hausdorff Dimension and spatial statistics. Professor Tapabrata Maiti is working on mixed models, high-dimensional data analysis and Bayesian data analysis. And Professor Chae Young Lim is working on spatial data analysis and Bayesian analysis. Thus, we really have excellent academic resources in our department. In order to understand these topics, we really need to do some paper reading work. And it can help us to cooperate with our Professors easily. And this can also help new students to choose academic advisors.
The student seminars of this semester will be basically paper reading and presenting. And the papers are picked up by presenters themselves among their favorite papers. And also the papers are selected according to the popularity among audience through voting. By reading papers together, we can discuss and learn together efficiently. By presenting papers, we can improve our presentation ability. Hopefully, these student seminars as a platform can stimulate the cooperation among students even with professors,