Student Seminar@Stat MSU, Spring 2012

Expectations

The primary purpose of the student seminar is to enhance the communication between students and professors, improve the students' comprehension and help students to find the specific research area that they are interested in. Also, by giving talks in the seminar, students can get the ability to better present, which is very important in academic life. Another important part is to stimulate the cooperation between Statistics and other related research fields, such as Probability, Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science and Biology. Thus the talks would be from professors in our department, also from professors of related departments, but more importantly, from graduate students.

All of the talks given by graduate students are intended to be accessible by anyone who has completed their qualifying exams. It could be students' own research work. It could also be an introduction to some topic which is useful in their research.

While preparing the presentation, there are a few guiding principals to which you could refer. First, for an informal seminar such as this, a blackboard talk would be more appropriate than a slides talk. This format slows the pace of the talk and makes the presentation more like a class lecture, which will encourage the audience to try the learn the materials as you present it. Second, try to keep it short. A talk can be too short if not enough material is introduced to make it interesting, but in research level talks, the last third of the talk is usually very technical and usually only accessible to experts in the field. Give more ideas than theorems. The most important thing when giving any talk is to know your audience.

Schedule

Related Materials

• Shuo-Yen Robert Li： A Martingale Approach to the Study of Occurrence of Sequence Patterns in Repeated Experiments，Ann. Probab. Volume 8, Number 6 (1980), 1171-1176.

• Rue H., Martino S. and Chopin N.: Approximate Bayesian Inference for Latent Gaussian Models Using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (with discussion). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 71, 2009, 319–392

• Finley, A.O., S. Banerjee, and D.W. MacFarlane. (2011) A hierarchical model for quantifying forest variables over large heterogeneous landscapes with uncertain forest areas. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 106:31–48.

Interesting Things Happening Around

• Joint Math Meetings 2012

• NIPS 2011