Volume 40 • Issue 6
IMS Bulletin
Contents
1 IMS Annual Meeting at JSM
2 Members’ News: Christian
Genest, CR Rao, Joe Glaz,
Xuming He, Jean-Pierre
Fouque, Craig A. Tracy
3 COPSS Awards
4 Project Euclid news;
Web-mentoring project
5 IMS@JSM in photos
6 Anirban’s Angle: Berkeley
and Indian statistics
7 Laha awardees
8–9 Obituaries: AV Skorokhod,
Patrick Billingsley
10 Rick’s Ramblings:
NSF proposal-writing
12 Presidential Address: Peter
Hall
15 SPA meeting report
16 BJPS 25th anniversary
17 Terence’s Stuff: Speaking,
reading, writing
18 IMS meetings
20 Other meetings
21 Employment Opportunities
24 International Calendar of
Statistical Events
27 Information for Advertisers
IMS Annual Meeting at JSM
The Institute of Mathematical Statistics held its 74th annual meeting at the Joint
Statistical Meetings in Miami’s South Beach, from July 30 to August 4, 2011. The
IMS highlights at JSM included the three Wald lectures by Greg Lawler, the Neyman
lecture by Michael I. Jordan, and five Medallion lectures, by Jianqing Fan, Chris
Holmes, Michael Newton, Sylvia Richardson, and Qi-Man Shao (see photos on page
5). The IMS awards session included
the presentation of IMS Fellows (photo
on page 3), the Carver Award (to Ross
Leadbetter—page 5) and the Laha Travel
Award recipients (page 7). It was followed
by Peter Hall’s Presidential Address,
which is reproduced on pages 12–14 of
this issue.
Miami in August is hot and very
humid, but despite that, many attendees
said that they liked the Art Deco district,
The Art Deco Marlin Hotel in South Beach
the Cuban restaurants, and of course,
the beach. With temperatures outside in the mid-90s (about 34ºC) and humidity at
around 85%, the 5,000 participants were certainly grateful for the air-conditioning!
At the Business Meeting, outgoing President Peter Hall summarized IMS activities
over the previous year, and paid tribute to all those who have worked on IMS committees. He thanked former Past-president Mike Steele, who
has now finished his term on the Executive Committee, for
his role in shepherding
the institute’s financial
resources.
Peter passed the
gavel to the new
President, Ruth
Williams. Ruth
will introduce
herself to IMS
Bulletin readers
in the next issue,
and will describe
New IMS President
a few of the IMS
Ruth Williams (left)
receives the gavel from
activities that are
Peter Hall, marking
planned or already
the transition of the
underway.
presidency for 2011
Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Alexf
September 2011
IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 • Issue 6
September 2011
ISSN 1544-1881
Contact information
IMS Bulletin Editor: Dimitris Politis
Assistant Editor: Tati Howell
Contributing Editors:
Peter Bickel, Anirban DasGupta, Rick
Durrett, Nicole Lazar, Terry Speed
Contact the IMS Bulletin by email:
e bulletin@imstat.org
To contact the IMS regarding your dues,
membership, subscriptions, orders or
change of address:
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IMS Dues and Subscriptions Office
9650 Rockville Pike, Suite L3503A
Bethesda, MD 20814-3998
USA
877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA]
+1 216 295 5661[international]
+1 301 634 7099
staff@imstat.org
To contact the IMS regarding any other
matter, including advertising, copyright
permission, offprint orders, copyright
transfer, societal matters, meetings, fellows
nominations and content of publications:
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Executive Director, Elyse Gustafson
IMS Business Office
PO Box 22718, Beachwood
OH 44122, USA
877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA]
+1 216 295 5661[international]
+1 216 295 5661
erg@imstat.org
Executive Committee
President:
Ruth Williams
president@imstat.org
President-Elect: Hans R. Künsch
president-elect@imstat.org
Past President: Peter Hall
president-past@imstat.org
Treasurer:
Jean Opsomer
jopsomer@stat.colostate.edu
Program Secretary: Guenther Walther
walther@stat.stanford.edu
Executive Secretary:Aurore Delaigle
a.delaigle@ms.unimelb.edu.au
2 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
IMS Members’ News
Statistical Society of Canada 2011 Gold Medal awarded to Christian Genest
Christian Genest, Professor of Statistics at McGill University, Montréal (Canada), is the
recipient of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) 2011 Gold
Medal. This award, which is the Society’s highest distinction, was
given to Christian “in recognition of his remarkable contributions
to multivariate analysis and nonparametric statistics, notably
through the development of models and methods of inference for
studying stochastic dependence, synthesizing expert judgments
and multi-criteria decision making, as well as for his applications
thereof in various fields such as insurance, finance, and hydrology.”
The award ceremony took place at the SSC 39th Annual
Christian Genest
Meeting, held in Wolfville (Nova Scotia), June 12-15, 2011.
For additional details, see http://www.ssc.ca/en/award-winners/award-winners-2011
CR Rao awarded 33rd honorary degree
C.R. Rao, Sc.D. (Cantab), FRS, has received another honorary degree, Doctor of Science
(Honoris Causa), this time from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was conferred by
Prof. T. R. Ariyaratne, Dean of the Faculty of Science, who said of Prof. Rao, “He is among
the world leaders in statistical science over the last six decades. His research, scholarship,
and professional services have had a profound influence on theory and applications of
statistics.” Professor Rao has now received 33 Honorary Doctoral Degrees from universities in 18 countries spanning six continents. Among his recent awards was the UK Royal
Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Gold, awarded triennially to those judged to have merited a signal mark of distinction by reason of their innovative contributions to the theory
or application of statistics.
On the Move…
Joe Glaz appointed dept head at U Conn
SIAM Fellows
SIAM, the Society for Industrial and
Applied Mathematics, has elected 34
new Fellows, among whom are two IMS
members, Jean-Pierre Fouque, University
of California at Santa Barbara, and Craig
Xuming He moves to Michigan
A. Tracy, University of California at Davis.
Former IMS Bulletin Editor Xuming He has Their citations are, respectively:
taken the position of H.C. Carver Professor
Jean-Pierre Fouque: For contributions
of Statistics, Department of Statistics,
to asymptotic analysis for random media and
University of Michigan, after 18 years
financial mathematics.
of service at the University of Illinois at
Craig A. Tracy: For fundamental contriUrbana-Champaign (1993–2011).
butions to statistical physics, integrable systems,
and probability
Changing job? Moving house? theory including random matrix theory
Don’t forget to tell the IMS!
and its applications.
Email the Dues & Subs Office
at staff@imstat.org
Joseph Glaz, Fellow of IMS, is now Head
of Department of Statistics, University of
Connecticut, effective July 1, 2011.
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 3
COPSS Awards
The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies announced its awards, presented at its
annual ceremony at JSM in Miami Beach on August 3 by COPSS president Xihong Lin.
The winner of the President’s Award is Nilanjan Chatterjee of the National Cancer
Institute, USA: “For outstanding contributions to the statistical sciences by ingenious methodological research with applications in epidemiology and genetics, including studies of gene-environment interactions, disease heterogeneity and genome-wide association studies; for fundamental contributions to the theory of case-control studies and complex retrospective sampling designs;
for demonstrating leadership and a vision as a statistical scientist by actively collaborating in
wide-ranging studies of cancer epidemiology and genetics and concurrently maintaining a vigorous methodological research program closely tied to cutting edge scientific issues; for exceptional
mentoring and service to the profession and to the National Cancer Institute.” Unusually,
Nilanjan was also selected to receive the Snedecor award, for his contribution to biometric
research and also recognized for the 2009 JASA paper, co-authored with Y.H. Chen and
R.J. Carroll, “Shrinkage Estimators for Robust and Efficient Inference in Haplotype-Based
Case-Control Studies.”
The F.N. David award winner for 2011 is Marie Davidian, North Carolina State
University: “For important contributions to the development of methods for analyzing data
from longitudinal studies and clinical trials, and for outstanding leadership and dedication to
the statistical profession.” As previously announced, the 2011 Fisher Lecturer was C.F Jeff Wu
of Georgia Institute of Technology. His lecture was titled “Post-Fisherian Experimentation:
from Physical to Virtual.”
We’ll bring you photos and an interview with the Presidents’ Award winner by Bhramar
Mukherjee, COPSS secretary, in the next issue. The call for nominations for next year’s
awards is at http://www.niss.org/copss
IMS Fellows at JSM
IMS Editors
IMS Journals and Publications
Annals of Statistics: Peter Bühlmann and Tony Cai
http://imstat.org/aos
Annals of Applied Statistics: Bradley Efron, Karen Kafadar,
Susan Paddock, Tilmann Gneiting, Samuel Kou, Kenneth
Lange & Stephen Fienberg
http://imstat.org/aoas
Annals of Probability: Ofer Zeitouni
http://imstat.org/aop
Annals of Applied Probability: Andrew Barbour
http://imstat.org/aap
Statistical Science: Jon Wellner
http://imstat.org/sts
IMS Lecture Notes – Monograph Series
http://imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm
IMS Collections
http://imstat.org/publications/
imscollections.htm
NSF-CBMS Regional Conference Series in
Probability and Statistics:
http://imstat.org/publications/nsf.htm
IMS Co-sponsored Journals and
Publications
Electronic Journal of Statistics: David Ruppert
http://imstat.org/ejs
Electronic Journal of Probability: Bálint Tóth
http://www.math.washington.edu/~ejpecp
Electronic Communications in Probability:
Timo Seppäläinen
http://www.math.washington.edu/~ejpecp
/ECP/index.php
Current Index to Statistics: George Styan
http://www.statindex.org
Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics:
Richard Levine
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jcgs
Statistics Surveys: Lutz Dümbgen
http://imstat.org/ss
Probability Surveys: Geoffrey Grimmett
http://imstat.org/ps
IMS-Supported Journals
Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré (B): Thierry
Bodineau & Lorenzo Zambotti http://imstat.org/aihp
Bayesian Analysis: Herbie Lee
http://ba.stat.cmu.edu
Bernoulli: Richard Davis
http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli
Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics:
Silvia Ferrari http://imstat.org/bjps
IMS-Affiliated Journals
ALEA: Latin American Journal of Probability and
Statistics: Claudio Landim
http://alea.impa.br/english
Probability and Mathematical Statistics: K. Bogdan,
M. Musiela, J. Rosiński, W. Szczotka, & W.A. Woyczyński
http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~pms
Other IMS contacts
Ten of this year’s 18 new IMS Fellows were able to travel to Miami for the presentation ceremony. Standing, l–r: Wesley
Johnson, Weng Kee Wong, IMS President Peter Hall, Wolfgang Polonik, William Rosenberger, Hongtu Zhu; seated, l–r:
Maria Eulália Vares, Hal Stern, Peter Bartlett, Jiashun Jin and Chunming Zhang. More photos from JSM are on page 5.
Bulletin website: http://bulletin.imstat.org
Main IMS website: http://imstat.org
Managing Editor: Michael Phelan phelanm@uci.edu
Production Editor: Patrick Kelly
pkelly@wharton.upenn.edu
4 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
Project Euclid news
Project Euclid Receives 2011 PAM Division Award
Project Euclid—the premier platform and information community for mathematics and
statistics resources from independent publishers—received the 2011 Division Award
from the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics
(PAM) Division of the Special Libraries
Association. Given annually, this award
recognizes significant contributions to
the literature of physics, mathematics, or astronomy, and honors work that demonstrably
improves the exchange of information within these three disciplines. The award also takes
into consideration projects that benefit libraries.
“It is an honor for Project Euclid to receive the Special Library Association’s PAM
Award,” said Mira Waller, Project Euclid Manager. “PAM is a community of peers and
a strong voice for librarians and information experts around the world. In receiving this
award I feel that Project Euclid is fulfilling its core mission of disseminating scholarly
information in the fields of mathematics and statistics.”
“The PAM Division Award is a real honor,” said David Ruddy, Cornell’s Project Euclid
lead and Director of Scholarly Communications Services at Cornell University Library. “It
is also validation that through strong collaborations the academy can effectively address
challenges facing scholarly communications.”
Cornell University Library launched Project Euclid in 2000. In 2008, Cornell and
Duke University Press established a collaborative partnership agreement to jointly manage
and expand the project. Its mission is to advance scholarly communication in the field
of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. It is designed to address the unique
needs of low-cost independent and society journals.
Project Euclid is jointly managed by Cornell University Library and Duke University
Press. IMS members should already be aware that you can access—free—all issues of
all IMS journals via Project Euclid: instructions on setting up access are at http://imstat.
org/publications/eaccess.htm. For information about Project Euclid, please contact
projecteuclid@dukeupress.edu, or visit projecteuclid.org.
Latest issues of journals on Project Euclid
IMS journals:
Annals of Applied Statistics 5(2a) & 5(2b),
June 2011:
http://projecteuclid.org/aoas
(AOAS Vol 5 issue 2b features a special
section on Statistics and Neuroscience)
Annals of Statistics 39(3), August 2011:
http://projecteuclid.org/aos
Annals of Applied Probability 21(3), June
2011:
http://projecteuclid.org/aoap
Annals of Probability 39(4), July 2011:
http://projecteuclid.org/aop
Statistical Science 26(2), May 2011:
http://projecteuclid.org/ss
IMS-supported journals:
Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré 47(3),
August 2011:
http://projecteuclid.org/aihp
Bernoulli 17(3), August 2011:
http://projecteuclid.org/bj
Brazilian Journal of Probability and
Statistics 25(3), November 2011
[25th anniversary issue—see article
on page 16]:
http://projecteuclid.org/bjps
Mentoring for PhD students in developing countries
A new international web-based mentor programme for PhD students in statistics and probability at universities in developing countries
has been launched, sponsored by the International Statistical Institute and the Bernoulli Society. PhD students enroll in the programme
via the internet, and are put in contact with volunteer senior statisticians and probabilists. The programme is based in Oslo, Norway. See
http://statmentoring.nr.no to find out more on how the programme works.
We are looking for many volunteer mentors! Senior statisticians and probabilists please enroll at http://statmentoring.nr.no/
statmentoring/index.php/Mentor_form. Membership is free. PhD students in developing countries can join at http://statmentoring.nr.no/
statmentoring/index.php/Student_forms.
Please visit the website for more information, and to volunteer or enrol.
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
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IMS@JSMCarver
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
medallist
Ross Leadbetter
(center)
with IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
Iain Johnstone
and
Peter Hall IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
Neyman lecturer
Michael
Jordan (right)
WaldIMS@JSM
lecturer Greg
Lawler (right)
JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
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IMS@JSM
Exec Committee
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IMS journal editors and AEs
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
Mike SteeleIMS@JSM
(r)
Medallion
lecture audience
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Medallion lecturer Chris Holmes (r)
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Medallion lecturer Michael Newton (l)
Medallion lecturer Jianqing Fan (r)
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
Medallion lecturer
Sylvia
Richardson
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
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JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSMItIMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM
wasn’t all hard
work—there
was the
Dance Party,
too. Let’s
hear it: Y–M–C–A!
Medallion lecturer
Qi-Man
Shao (r)IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM
IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IMS@JSM IM
6 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
Anirban’s Angle: Berkeley & Indian Statistics
Anirban
DasGupta writes:
Recently, I read the 1966
Neyman Festschrift volume, edited
by Evelyn Fix and F.N. David. In it,
I found a nice overview of generalized
inverses by C.R. Rao, and a lovely article
by P.V. Sukhatme, with a long section on
bias correction of ratio estimates by subsampling. My mind drifted off to the many
other instances of long and productive
connections between Berkeley and Indian
statisticians, that have often surpassed the
boundaries of professional collaboration
and have turned into abiding friendships. I
want to reminisce a little, a kind of history
looking forward.
Early instances that I recall are the
PhD dissertation of Ashok Maitra under
David Blackwell, Prem Puri with Neyman,
Sudhakar Dharmadhikari with Barankin,
and D. Basu’s voyage to Berkeley on a
Fulbright in 1953. The magnificent MaitraSudderth text on Discrete Games (1996)
is clearly influenced by David Blackwell’s
seminal contributions to stochastic games.
And Basu’s entire professional development
was directly influenced by his association with Neyman, and later with David
Blackwell and Lucien Le Cam.
Some other early examples of the
Berkeley–India relationship are the articles
by Rao, Bahadur, and Basu in the Berkeley
symposium proceedings (1965). Although
not a joint collaboration, the Rao-Blackwell
theorem is a household name, and such
cornerstones of inference such as the
Lehmann-Scheffé theorem were published
in Sankhyá. It is tempting to conjecture
that Sankhyá attracted these revolutionary
articles because of the Berkeley-ISI personal
bond. Much later, Peter Bickel and J.K.
Ghosh wrote a well-known paper on
Bartlett corrections (1990) and the 1982
Blackwell-Ramamoorthi note settled the
conjecture that Bayes sufficiency is in general weaker than ordinary sufficiency. P.K.
Sen and J.K. Ghosh contributed an article
to the Neyman-Kiefer proceedings (1985)
on the LRT for the finite mixture model
(Hartigan, 1985). On the other hand, Peter
Bickel and Anat Sakov contributed a survey
on Richardson extrapolation and bootstrap
(Bickel and Yahav, 1988; Politis et al., 1999)
and Terry Speed and Yee Hwa Yang wrote
on microarrays for the Basu Memorial Issue
of Sankhyá (2002), all worthy examples of
that Berkeley–India connection.
Then, too, there has been a steady flow
of exchange of students and visitors. B.V.
Rao was invited to Berkeley after he solved
Ulam’s problem in his thesis. Ashok Maitra
visited Berkeley several times. Few know
that Terry Speed went to ISI and taught for
ISEC, the international wing of ISI. Three
of Peter Bickel’s earliest students were Hira
Koul, D.P. Gokhale, and R.K. Aiyar. Erich
Lehmann had (nearly) countless Indian
students—Gouri Bhattacharya, M.L. Puri,
M. Raghavachari, to name but a few. Rabi
Bhattacharya did some of his most influential work at Berkeley. Most recently, Antar
Bandyopadhyay, Smarajit Bose, Probal
Chaudhuri, and Manjunath Krishnapur
have returned to India after doctoral work
at Berkeley, and Ani Adhikari and Sourav
Chatterjee are current members of the
Berkeley faculty. Such a long history!
Visits, seminars, and personal conversations are extremely helpful for exchange of
ideas, confirmation, falsification, and crystallization of what is only a thought. I know
that Neyman,
Elizabeth
Scott,
David
Blackwell,
Peter Bickel,
and Terry Speed
have gone to the
ISI; Jeff Wu and
Jianqing Fan,
both Berkeley
PhDs, have too.
Extraordinarily influential work on machine
learning, high-dimensional inference,
genomics, and random matrices is now
going on at Berkeley, and students and faculty at the ISI ought to listen to this work
face-to-face. These would be timely topics
for the Mahalanobis lectures.
A few personal memories. I was Terry’s
student on his sufficiency course at the ISI,
and just this year he and I worked on putting together Basu’s most influential work
in a Springer volume. It was a lovely period
of my life. Sandrine Dudoit and I just
worked on a survey of sufficiency. David
Freedman was advising me on models for
fractional data up until six days before his
tragic death. I first listened to Peter Bickel
in 1980 at a conference at the Delhi ISI.
The responsible ISI official greeted a large
contingent of us at the Calcutta central
train station with a confident toothy smile
and said, “Board this train.” Some twenty
minutes later, we were all detained for
ticketless travelling and given a hefty fine.
On our return, ISI reimbursed us for the
fines, but it had to be shown as taxi fare.
Peter was also taking the train from New
Delhi to Calcutta; he was a little late, and
at the stairs, I only had time to shake his
hand. I properly met Peter for the first time
in 1991 at a conference in Ottawa: I gave
a very simple talk on extremum efficiencies
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 7
in some nonparametric problems and he
made some comments to me after the talk.
Peter invited me to come to Berkeley that
Fall, and I spent a month at the MSRI.
I was interested in some problems on
convolutions at that time and I recall Peter
coming to my office at Evans Hall to help
me. The little work on t-intervals, Basu and
DasGupta (1995), also benefitted from that
MSRI visit.
At Purdue, I learned of the close professional and personal relationship between
Shanti Gupta and Peter Bickel and Lucien
Le Cam. I can vouch that Shanti earnestly
counted on counsel from Peter and Lucien
Le Cam. In the January of 2002, Shanti
passed away most unexpectedly after a brief
illness. I informed Peter the same evening. I
recall Peter writing back “This is a great loss
for Purdue. I am very sorry. It is a personal
loss for me. He was a friend.”
That’s what I mean: there is a long and
treasured friendship between Indian statistics and Berkeley, and I so much wish to see
it prosper and last. ■
What about other special working relationships? Do you have a story to share? You
can comment on this (and other articles) at
http://bulletin.imstat.org. Go on!
I saw
the Laha awards on
the IMS website and my advisers
encouraged me to apply. It's a great pleasure
This was
to receive this award! One suggestion: I think
the first time I attended
it may get more attention from us students if a
the Presidential Address, and I won’t
presentation session (or two) is organized for
forget the moment I was called as a Laha
Laha award recipients in the future.
Award recipient. The highlight of the evening was
Gongjun Xu, Columbia meeting many statistical fellows, including IMS
University
president Peter Hall. I really enjoyed JSM.
Laha Awards 2011
Hui Nie, University of Pennsylvania
This
was my first IMS
meeting. I learned a lot from
others’ research presentations, and
met lots of interesting people. Miami is
a great place, I liked the beach! I would
definitely encourage people to apply for
next year’s Laha awards.
Dan Shen, UNC Chapel Hill
8 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
Obituary: Anatolii Skorokhod
1930–2011
The world’s mathematical community
lost one of its most prominent members
when Professor Anatolii Vladimirovich
Skorokhod died on January 3, 2011.
Anatolii Skorokhod was born on September
10, 1930 in Nikopol, Ukraine. In 1948,
he graduated from secondary school
(with a gold medal) and entered the Kyiv
State University, where he specialized in
probability theory at the Department of
Mathematical Analysis, under the considerable influence of Professors B.V. Gnedenko
and I.I. Gikhman. In one of his first papers
(1954) Skorokhod clarified the structure of
densities of stable distributions.
In the early 1950s, the atmosphere at
Kyiv University was far from friendly, which
resulted finally in B.V. Gnedenko’s departure. Foreseeing this, Gnedenko wrote to
A.N. Kolmogorov: “Dear Andrei, one more
matter. Here we have a graduating student,
very able in my view, Skorokhod Anatolii
Vladimirovich, 22 years of age. Things are
going in such a way that it would be better for
him to leave and attend postgraduate courses
elsewhere. If there is a possibility, by the
ministry, to assign him to Moscow University
for postgraduate study, then you will do a good
deed both for the student and for science...”
(From a letter of B.V. Gnedenko to A.N.
Kolmogorov, October 30, 1952.)
Thus, by the efforts of Kolmogorov,
Moscow State University acquired three
post-graduate students: A. V. Skorokhod
(supervisor E.B. Dynkin), V.S. Korolyuk
and V.S. Mikhalevich. All of them would
later become Members of the Academy of
Sciences of Ukraine.
A.V. Skorokhod wrote his Candidate
dissertation, Limit theorems for random
processes, at Moscow State University,
in 1956, and returned to the Kyiv State
University. In 1962 he completed his
Doctoral dissertation, SDE and limit theorems for stochastic processes, and was made
Professor of the Kyiv State University the
following year. A year later he moved to the
Institute of Mathematics of Academy of
Sciences of Ukraine as Head of Department
of the theory of stochastic processes. He
became a Corresponding member of the
Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1967
(and an Academician in 1985), and was
awarded the Ukrainian State Prize in
Science and Technology in 1982 and 2003.
In 1985 Skorokhod moved to Michigan
State University, USA, and in 2000 he was
elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.
A.V. Skorokhod’s contributions to
probability theory, mathematical statistics,
and the theory of stochastic processes, were
fundamental, in particular in the areas:
limit theorems for stochastic processes;
stochastic differential equations; probability
distributions in infinite dimensional spaces;
stochastic integration of anticipating functions; and asymptotic behavior of dynamic
systems under random perturbations.
In the 1950s A.V. Skorokhod began
a large cycle of works on limit theorems
for stochastic processes. He proposed an
original method of studying limit theorems,
based on two profound ideas: the method
of a single probability space and introduction of several topologies on the space of
functions without discontinuities of the
second kind. His main idea in the area of
limit theorems was to introduce a topology
which would make this space a Polish space
(complete separable metric space). Along
this line A.V. Skorokhod introduced four
topologies; established necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence in those
topologies; described compact sets for each
topology; and listed the most important
Anatolii V. Skorokhod in 2003 (photo: Alex Novikov)
examples of continuous functionals.
The most well-known topology is the
J1-topology (we call it the Skorokhod topology), which proved to be very useful in the
case of typical path spaces.
A.V. Skorokhod obtained many significant results in the theory of stochastic
differential equations, namely: the theorem
of comparison for linear diffusion, which
allowed him to get the first results on the
existence of strong solutions for the case
of non-Lipschitz drift coefficients; the
theory of diffusion processes with boundary
conditions of different types; asymptotic
behavior of solutions; fundamental results
on ergodicity and stability of solutions. We
also mention his results on the problem of
differentiability of probability measures; the
structure of the Radon-Nikodým derivatives
for quasi-invariant measures on a Hilbert
space.
Along with a great number of scientific
papers (about 300), A.V. Skorokhod wrote
many books, textbooks, and monographs
(more than 25), which are well-known in
the probability world and are constantly
used both by students and experts in probability theory and the theory of stochastic
processes. His last book, with Habib Salehi
and Frank Hoppensteadt, was Random perturbation methods with applications in science
and engineering (Springer, 2002, Ser. Appl.
Math. Sci., vol. 150).
Alex Novikov (University of Technology,
Sydney, Australia) and Albert Shiryaev
(Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow)
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 9
Obituary: Patrick Billingsley
1925–2011
Patrick Billingsley, scholar, writer, and actor,
died Friday, April 22 at the age of 85. He is
survived by his children Franny, Patty, Julie,
Marty and Paul, and by his companion,
Florence Weisblatt. His late wife of nearly
50 years, social activist Ruth Billingsley,
died in 2000.
Billingsley was born May 3, 1925 in
Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He earned
a bachelor’s degree in engineering from
the US Naval Academy in 1948, then
served in the US Navy until 1957. As a
Navy officer he lived for a year in Japan,
where he earned a black belt in judo.
While still a naval officer he entered the
Princeton University graduate program in
mathematics; he received a master’s degree
in 1952 and a doctorate in 1955, the latter
under the supervision of William Feller. In
1957–58 he worked as a National Science
Foundation Fellow in Mathematics at
Princeton. Billingsley joined the faculty
at the University of Chicago in 1957,
with appointments in the departments of
Statistics and Mathematics, and remained
on the faculty until retiring as professor
emeritus in 1994. He served as chairman
(or, as he liked to put it, “acting chairman”) of the Statistics department, from
1980 to 1983. He was a Fulbright Fellow
and visiting professor at the University of
Copenhagen, Denmark in 1964–65 and a
Guggenheim Fellow and visiting professor
at the University of Cambridge, England,
in 1971–72. Billingsley was the first editor
of the Annals of Probability, from 1976 to
1979, and President of the IMS in 1983.
Billingsley’s professional accomplishments were many and varied, but he will be
remembered first and foremost as an expositor. He wrote five books, Statistical Inference
for Markov Processes (1961), The Elements of
Statistical Inference (in collaboration with
David Huntsberger, 1986), Ergodic Theory
and Information (1965), Convergence of
Probability Measures (1968), and Probability
and Measure (1978). The last three all
became, at least for a time, the authoritative works on their subjects; all are still
widely cited, and Probability and Measure,
now in its third edition, is still a standard
graduate-level textbook. Billingsley also
published a number of expository papers,
including an article on prime numbers and
Brownian motion that was awarded a Lester
R. Ford prize for mathematical writing. In
this article he explained that his approach
to mathematical exposition had come from
his PhD mentor Feller: “For the most part
I shall only illustrate general results by
examples and special cases. For this there is
the authority of William Feller, who used
to tell us, his students, that the best in
mathematics, as in art, letters, and all else
[…] consists of the general embodied in the
concrete.”
He went on, perhaps recalling his days
in the US military, “Although at first I
thought that was simply an anti-military
statement, I did eventually understand
it as the intellectual-esthetic principle he
intended and have tried ever since to keep it
at the front of my mind.”
Billingsley is perhaps best known in
mathematical analysis as the inventor of
what is now called Billingsley dimension,
an extension of the notion of Hausdorff
dimension to positive Borel measures.
The Billingsley dimension is one of three
fundamental quantities attached to an
ergodic, invariant probability measure in
a smooth dynamical system, the others
being the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy and
the Lyapunov exponent(s). The relationships among these three quantities was an
important theme in the study of smooth,
Patrick Billingsley
chaotic dynamical systems in the 1970s and
1980s, which culminated in the celebrated
Ledrappier-Young formula expressing
entropy as the sum of the Lyapunov
exponents multiplied by the directional
Billingsley dimensions. Billingsley also
made important contributions to the field
of weak convergence—beginning with his
PhD thesis on the invariance principle
for dependent random variables—and to
probabilistic number theory. He delivered
the 1973 Wald lectures on the probability
theory of additive arithmetic functions, and
the 1972 Rouse Ball lecture at Cambridge
on prime numbers and Brownian motion.
In the mid-1960s Billingsley embarked
on what became a parallel career in acting.
His first roles were in amateur productions,
but beginning in 1970 he played leading
roles in more than 20 professional productions at the Court Theatre and Body Politic
Theatre in Chicago. His roles included
the Captain in We Bombed in New Haven
(1970); Alonzo in The Tempest (1977);
Dysart in Equus, (1980); and Petey in The
Birthday Party (1978 and 1985). A talent
scout saw him perform in The Lover in
1977, and this led to a successful audition
for a part in the 1978 Kirk Douglas film
The Fury. Billingsley never met Douglas,
but they appear on screen together during
a car chase on Wacker Drive and Van
Buren Street in Chicago; Billingsley played
a bad guy who ended up dying in a fiery
crash. He went on to appear in seven more
films and in nine television shows. Among
Continued on page 11
10 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
Rick’s Ramblings:
Writing an NSF proposal with New Broader Impacts
Being an accomplished Jedi Master, I feel a sense of noblesse oblige
when it comes to instructing the Padawans in the ways of the
Force. Today’s column is written primarily for a Youngling who
intends to submit an NSF proposal to the probability program at
NSF for the November 7, 2011 deadline. Undoubtedly much of
this advice applies to statistics proposals and to grants submitted to
other agencies, but in that case you should heed the advice people
have given me for years: get professional help. Those competitions
require a different sort of verbal fertilizer, so you should seek advice
from a colleague who has had success with that type of grant.
The first and most important rule for writing a proposal is to
get your materials ready well before the deadline. This is necessary because you don’t actually submit your grant. It is sent in by
your Office of Sponsored Projects. At most universities, after you
have uploaded your proposal to Fastlane, your department’s grants
person looks it over and when she is satisfied it is complete, you
release to OSP to view, edit, and submit. After OSP has verified
that you are following the university’s rules about tuition, indirect
costs, and cost sharing then it is off to NSF.
A generic NSF proposal has five main parts. A one-page Project
Summary, a 15-page Project Description, References (with no page
limit), a two-page NSF style CV, and a budget, with up to three
pages of explanation. The CV is the easiest so I’ll start with that.
The first thing you need to do before submitting a proposal is to go
online and get the Grant Proposal Guide, which is now a hefty 71
pages. It is not a great read but fortunately it has a detailed table of
contents.
In Section C.1.f of Chapter 2 you will find precise instructions
for your CV. How to describe your education, previous positions,
up to five publications related to the proposal, up to five significant
publications, up to five synergistic activities, all your collaborators
in the last 48 months, all your PhD students ever, and recent
postdocs mentored. You shouldn’t sweat the limit on relevant publications. You can refer to as many of your papers as you want in the
proposal narrative and list them in the references.
The second easiest piece is the budget. For the youngest investigators this is simple: two months’ summer salary, and some money
for travel or perhaps a new laptop. If your department demands
you ask for some money for supplies, then go along, but forget
about page charges unless you publish in biology journals where
they don’t take no for an answer. If you are at the point of having
graduate students then think about summer support, but the cost
Rick Durrett, Jedi Master of proposalwriting, writes some instructions for the
Younglings, including the NSF’s revised
broader impacts criterion.
of academic year support plus benefits plus tuition (and overhead)
adds up quickly. It is easy to let your budget fantasies get the best
of you, so keep them in check. Gayle, who processed my grants
for over 10 years at Cornell, had a cartoon on her door with the
punch-line, “What the heck, I’ll add another zero.”
NSF grants are evaluated based on two criteria: “intellectual
merit” and “broader impact” introduced in 1997. These MUST be
explicitly addressed in the proposal summary, and should be done
in two paragraphs that start with the two phrases in bold face. To
quote http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/gpg/broaderimpacts.pdf: “Experience
shows that while most proposers have little difficulty responding to the
criterion relating to intellectual merit, many proposers have difficulty
understanding how to frame the broader impacts of the activities they
propose to undertake.” This document has a large number of useful
suggestions for things to include, such as: service as referee or
associate editor, IMS or AMS committees, conference organization,
interdisciplinary research activities, course development, undergraduate research supervision, and high school outreach.
The broader impacts criterion has recently been revised.
OMG! (as the Younglings might say). Letters in the July 8 Science
(volume 333, 157–158) and in the July 14 Nature (volume 475,
page 141) rail against the changes, saying “they move too far in the
direction of accountability at the cost of scientific creativity and
autonomy,” and calling the goals “at best arbitrary and at worst
an exercise in political triangulation.” In brief, the new National
Science Board plan, posted online June 14 (see nsf.gov/nsb/
publications/2011/06_mrtf.jsp), will require researchers to identify
their broader impacts by selecting from a list of nine national
priorities:
• Increased economic competitiveness
• Increased national security
• Increased partnerships between academia and industry
• Enhanced infrastructure for research and education
September . 2011
• Development of a globally-competitive
STEM workforce
• Increased participation of women,
persons with disabilities and underrepresented minorities
• Improved pre-K to 12 STEM education
and teacher development
• Increased public scientific literacy
The first two were red flags for the bulls in
Science who say the list “excludes protecting
the environment and addressing other social
problems” and this may “undermine the
attractiveness of STEM disciplines to more
idealistic students, who are interested in
meeting human needs rather than fostering
economic competitiveness.” A little melodramatic, I think. I am all for protecting
the environment—e.g., not drilling for oil
off the outer banks of North Carolina—but
shoving in Republican faces the fact that
NSF science can stand in the way of corporate America screwing the environment for
profit is not going to help the budget.
Oh well, even if you hate it, the simple
fact of the matter is that unless you address
the broader impacts of your research, as
well as jump through the new hoops of the
new Postdoc Mentoring Plan and the Data
Management Plan, your proposal will be
dead on arrival. Most first timers will not
be asking for postdoc support, so the PMP
is moot, but everyone is forced to have a
DMP even if it consists of the simple statement “Data, I don’t need no stinking data.”
In less flippant terms, the NSF FAQ says “It
is acceptable to state in the DMP that the
project is not anticipated to generate data
Photo: Flikr/reway2007
“The Force is strong in this NSF grant proposal”
IMS Bulletin . 11
or samples that require management and/or
sharing. PIs should note that the statement
will be subject to peer review.”
Climbing down from my soapbox, it
is now time to address the nitty-gritty of
writing the proposal narrative. If you
haven’t started yet, then you are three
months late. About six months before the
deadline you should start jotting down ideas
of things to work on. You can’t write a plan
for three years of research in two weeks, no
matter how many hours a day you sit there
and scratch your head. You need time to sit
and think, scribble exploratory calculations
on your tablet, and read articles about new
things you might work on.
People who have already had NSF
grants will begin their proposals with up
to five pages of results from prior support,
which highlight previous achievements and
make the case that they can actually do
what they say. Even with up to five pages
used up with this, there is room to discuss
4–6 problems, which need to be explained
in sufficient detail and related to the
literature.
The problems you pose must be interesting but accessible. It is one thing to say
that you will use the winding of Brownian
motion in the infinitely punctured complex
plane to prove the Riemann Hypothesis,
but unless you are Stas Smirnov, you will
need to work hard to convince the proposal
reviewers that you have a chance of doing
this. On the other hand the problems you
propose should not be too close your previous work. In my case if I were to write that
I was going to use the block construction
to prove coexistence for some interacting
particle systems that arose from ecological
competition then I would expect reviewers
to complain.
Younglings, you should not be ashamed
to ask for help from more experienced
colleagues. Have them read over what you
have written and make comments. They
may not know the details of what you are
going to work on but, then again, your
proposal will be evaluated by panelists who
are generally knowledgeable about your
research area but are not experts on your
particular research topic: a probability panel
will have between 10 and 12 people who
have to review 90 proposals.
The final thing to say is: don’t get
discouraged. Serving on the probability
panel is very depressing. Only about 10%
of the proposals are truly “not worthy of
support,” but only about one-third can be
funded. This situation leads to some agonizing and occasionally random decisions. So,
if you are just starting out, keep in mind
that it will take several tries to have success.
Read the reviews carefully, discuss them
with your colleagues and keep in mind their
assessment represents personal opinions that
my change dramatically from year to year. ■
Patrick Billingsley, 1925–2011
Continued from page 9
other roles, he played a biology teacher
in My Bodyguard (1980), the professor in
Somewhere in Time (1980) and the bailiff in
The Untouchables (1987).
Billingsley was, in the words of his
daughter Marty, a “true Renaissance man”,
a man of diverse interests who excelled in
many things. He painted; he wrote; he read
Beowulf in the original Old English; he
worked out daily in the university gym for
nearly 40 years. He had a wry comment for
almost every occasion. When he vacated
his office in Eckhart Hall some years back,
he invited me to help myself to whatever
books were there. I was amused—but
not surprised—to find, between a worn
copy of Burns’ Poems and Songs and a
Complete Works of William Shakespeare,
a copy of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1978
autobiography, Arnold: The Education of a
Bodybuilder.
Steve Lalley, University of Chicago
12 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
“Ranking Our Excellence,” or “Assessing Our
Quality,” or Whatever…
One of the final responsibilities of each IMS President is to deliver a Presidential Address
at the IMS annual meeting. Peter Hall gave his talk on August 1 at JSM in Miami. The text
is reproduced in full here.
W
e live in an era where almost everything apparently can
be quantified, and most things are. Massive quantities
of data are generated every day on subjects ranging
from our supermarket purchases to changes in the climate. This
creates unprecedented opportunities for statisticians, but also many
challenges. Not least are the challenges of quantifying our own
professional lives. The managers of the institutions, organisations
and companies where we work measure our performance, and
the quality of our work, using rankings, bibliometric analyses and
similar approaches.
Tonight I want to say a few words about these matters. They are
fundamentally statistical in many ways, yet no-one, least of all us
or our managers, has many of the tools necessary to undertake the
analysis properly and convey the results. In many cases we do not
even seem to have the knowledge needed to develop the tools.
Rankings, for example of the institutions or departments where
we work, are among the most common of the techniques that are
used to analyse us, and perhaps to divide and conquer us. Goldstein
and Spiegelhalter, in a paper in the Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society (Series A) in 1996, argued that no ranking should be unaccompanied by a measure of its authority. This recommendation is
seldom honoured. Rankings should also be reasonably transparent,
so that the implicit statements that they make about us are clear to
non-experts (in some cases that includes us!).
International rankings of universities are a case in point. The
data on which they rely are seldom accessible, and the methodology they use is typically secret. The methodology usually can be
accessed only approximately, for example via a process of reverse
engineering, noting the changes in rankings after Nobel Prizes, etc,
have been awarded. For all these reasons the rankings are far from
transparent. And they are seldom accompanied by a measure of
their reliability. Yet they influence significantly the comments, and
subsequently the actions, of university managers and, sometimes,
the decisions of governments.
The US National Research Council ranking of university statistics departments, compiled using data on graduate programs and
released almost a year ago, is to be applauded for incorporating statistical measures of authority, based on resampling ideas, into their
analysis. An extensive manual describes methodology and metrics.
Admirably, last November the ASA organised a NISS workshop on
assessing the quality of graduate programs. However, the ranking of
graduate programs does not meet the criterion of transparency. As a
result, the ranking sometimes has been misinterpreted by university
managers. More generally, statistical issues relating to modelling
rankings, describing their authority and simplifying their interpretation, deserve greater attention from us than we have given them.
Rankings, like bar graphs and pie charts, are only a way
of presenting data. The data themselves should also be a focus
of our attention. The IMS as a society, and also through its
individual members, has played an important role in the study of
performance-related data. In particular, the IMS was one of three
professional bodies (the others were the International Mathematical
Union and the International Council of Industrial and Applied
Mathematics) which produced the report Citation Statistics,
addressing that most pernicious of academic topics, bibliometric
data and their analysis. The report’s authors, Robert Adler, John
Ewing and Peter Taylor, expressed concern about the use of citation
data for assessing research performance. Their report, published in
Statistical Science in 2009, noted that:
There is a belief that citation statistics are inherently more
accurate because they substitute simple numbers for complex judgments, and hence overcome the possible subjectivity of peer review.
Adler, Ewing and Taylor pointed to the fallacy of such beliefs, and
drew conclusions that, although concerning to some scientists (and
September . 2011
to university and other institutional managers), resonate with many
of us:
• The accuracy of citation metrics (e.g., raw citation counts,
impact factors, h-factors and so forth) is illusory. Moreover, the
misuse of citation statistics is widespread and egregious. In spite
of repeated attempts to warn against such misuse (e.g., the misuse of the impact factor), governments, institutions, and even
scientists themselves continue to draw unwarranted or even false
conclusions from the misapplication of citation statistics.
• Sole reliance on citation-based metrics replaces one kind of
judgment with another: Instead of subjective peer review one
has the subjective interpretation of a citation’s meaning.
• While statistics are valuable for understanding the world in
which we live, they provide only a partial understanding. Those
who promote the use of citation statistics as a replacement for
a fuller understanding of research implicitly hold such a belief.
We not only need to use statistics correctly—we need to use
them wisely as well.
Bibliometric analyses, and other statistical measures, are sometimes
used in connection with appointment and promotion cases,
occasionally with dramatic consequences (as we’ll see below, when
discussing the Australian experience). Indeed, potential applications to appointment and promotions decisions are major reasons
for heightened interest in the interpretation and application of
bibliometric analyses. However, many other empirical approaches
have been employed. They range from the Texas A&M University
system’s development of methodology, which evaluates how much
university professors “are worth,” based on their salaries, how much
research money they bring in, and how much money they generate
from teaching; to the much more widespread use of student evaluations of classroom teaching. All have weaknesses, and some have
strengths as well.
Several nations have attempted, or are currently attempting, to
unlock the secrets of bibliometric data so that they can use them
to their advantage. For example, the first Italian national research
evaluation, which commenced in 2003, sought to answer the following questions, among others:
(i) Are peer review judgements and bibliometric indicators independent variables, and if not, what is the strength of association
between them?
(ii) Is the association between peer judgement and article citation
rating significantly stronger than the association between peer
judgement and journal citation rating?
The Italians concluded that:
(i) Bibliometrics are not independent of peer review assessment;
IMS Bulletin . 13
but while the correlation between peer assessment and bibliometric indicators is statistically significant, it is not perfect.
(ii) “Bibliometric indicators may be considered as approximation
measures of the inherent quality of papers, which, however,
remains fully assessable only with aid of human unbiased judgement, meditation, and elaboration. We advocate the integration
of peer review with bibliometric indicators, in particular those
directly related to the impact of individual articles, during the
next national assessment exercises.”
Australian authorities too have been endeavouring to turn bibliometric data to good use, so as to distribute block grant funding to
universities. (This is the type of funding that, in the US, is passed
on largely in the form of grant overheads. In this sense, grant
income in the US is used as a proxy for research performance.)
Interestingly, in 2011 a trial run of Australia’s research assessment
exercise led the federal government to conclude that a rather
controversial ranked list of journals, to which the government had
seemed to be committed, was not providing the overall benefits
that had been anticipated. Announcing the virtual abandonment
of journal rankings three months ago, the Australian Minister for
Innovation, Industry, Science and Research noted that the ranking
was being seriously misused by university managers:
There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being
deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the [university]
sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and [were]
based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings.
One common example was the setting of targets [in connection
with appointments or promotions] for publication in [highly
ranked] journals by institutional research managers.
However, there is concern that in a range of research fields in
Australia, rankings based on citation analyses, rather than peer
review, will fill any gaps left by reducing reliance on journal rankings. Moreover, journal rankings will still apparently be used to
some extent in the Australian research assessment process.
The Australian government’s enthusiasm for a research assessment exercise that emphasises bibliometric analysis, and, in many
fields of research, seems to give peer review a significantly lesser
role, would appear to be at odds with the Italian experience. It
is also in conflict with the UK’s proposed new methodology for
assessing research importance, which, as we shall now relate,
originally seemed to favour a largely bibliometric process but then
retreated. Just as importantly, the Australian government’s decision
to largely abandon journal rankings reflects an issue that has to
14 . IMS Bulletin
be borne in mind whenever funding is distributed as the outcome
of a process of performance evaluation: As is no doubt hoped,
the people receiving that funding respond to their evaluation by
changing their behaviour so as to achieve more funding next time,
but they may change in ways that are overtly counterproductive to
achieving the goals that the process was originally designed for.
The UK once argued rather forthrightly that its Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE) should not explicitly take account of
citation data and the like. For example, the instructions to 2008
RAE panels included the following injunction:
In assessing excellence, the sub-panel will look for originality,
innovation, significance, depth, rigour, influence on the discipline
and wider fields and, where appropriate, relevance to users. In
assessing publications the sub-panel will use the criteria in normal
use for acceptance by internationally recognised journals. The
sub-panel will not use a rigid or formulaic method of assessing
research quality. It will not use a formal ranked list of outlets, nor
impact factors, nor will it use citation indices in a formulaic way.
However, the replacement for the RAE was originally intended to
use metrics in place of peer review:
It is the Government’s intention that the current method for
determining the quality of university research—the UK Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE)—should be replaced after the next
cycle is completed in 2008. Metrics, rather than peer-review, will
be the focus of the new system and it is expected that bibliometrics
(using counts of journal articles and their citations) will be a
central quality index in this system.
[Evidence Report, Research Policy Committee of Universities, p.3]
The Times Higher Education Supplement for 9 November 2007
headlined a story on its front page with the words, “New RAE
based on citations,” and commented thus:
… After next year’s RAE, funding chiefs will measure the number
of citations for each published paper in large science subjects as
part of the new system to determine the allocation of more than
£1 billion a year in research funding. A report published by
Universities UK enforces such a “citations per paper” system as
the only sensible option among a number of so-called bibliometric
quality measurements. It concludes that measuring citations can
accurately indicate research quality.
Volume 40 . Issue 6
The UK apparently has withdrawn from this position. The Research
Excellence Framework (REF), which will replace the RAE and be
run for the first time in 2013, will instead assess research in at least
three ways and incorporate peer review:
• Outputs (total weight 65%): The primary focus of the REF
exercise will be to identify excellent research, apparently using
largely expert peer review but, in subjects where robust data are
available, “peer review may be informed by additional citation
information.”
• Impact (20%): The REF will endeavour to identify cases where
“researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable
benefits to society, public policy, culture, quality of life and the
economy.”
• Environment (15%): The REF will assess, and take into
account, the quality of the research environment.
In the UK, particularly in the mathematical sciences including
statistics, the second of these criteria has become the most controversial, not least because of its potential to focus research on
short-term goals. It is admittedly less of a problem for statisticians
than for, say, pure mathematicians.
The US is not as vulnerable to these difficulties as many other
nations—such as the UK, European countries including France,
Italy and The Netherlands (but not Germany), and Australia—
that have relatively unified national higher education systems.
Admittedly, substantial research funding is provided federally in
the US, but few US states would allow their university systems to
be scrutinised federally in the manner that is accepted practice in
other countries. In a state or provincial system a state can experiment with different ways of measuring and rewarding research
performance, and the others can sit on the sidelines and watch the
experiment, adopting the methodology only if it is effective.
As statisticians we should become more involved in these matters than we are. We are often the subject of the analyses discussed
above, and almost alone we have the skills to respond to them, for
example by developing new methodologies or by pointing out that
existing approaches are challenged. To illustrate the fact that issues
that are obvious to statisticians are often ignored in bibliometric
analysis, I mention that many proponents of impact factors, and
other aspects of citation analysis, have little concept of the problems caused by averaging very heavy tailed data. (Citation data are
typically of this type.) We should definitely take a greater interest in
this area. ■
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Rudy Beran, Valerie Isham
and Wolfgang Polonik for helpful comments.
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 15
SPA 2011, Oaxaca, Mexico
Mireille Chaleyat-Maurel, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France,
reports from June’s Conference on Stochastic Processes and their
Applications: What ingredients make a successful conference? An
networks. The Lévy lecture by Jean-François Le Gall described the
solution of a long-standing problem concerning scaling limits of
random triangulations of the sphere. The Itô prize was awarded to
Haya Kaspi and Nathalie Eisenbaum for their paper on permanental processes published in the journal Stochastic Processes and their
Applications in 2010. In addition, there was a large variety of special
sessions, consisting of three talks each, contributed session talks,
and posters.
The social program was sensational. On Monday, a reception
was offered at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca.
Besides exhibiting Modern Art from the whole world, the Museum
periodically shows works by Oaxacan master painters Rufino
Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, Rodolfo Morales, Rodolfo Nieto and
Francisco Gutiérrez.
Wednesday afternoon featured an excursion to the very interesting location of Monte Albán, a large pre-Columbian archaeological
site near Oaxaca. Monte Alban was the ancient capital of the
Zapotecs and one of the first cities in Mesoamerica. It was founded
approximately 500 years BC and flourished until 750 AD.
The conference dinner was in the historic “Ex-Convento de
Santa Catalina” with a show of the Guelaguetza, (or Mondays
of the Hill) with traditional dancing in costume in groups. Each
costume and dance had local cultural significance.
Photo: Víctor Rivero
attractive scientific program, an efficient local organizing committee
and a beautiful location. All these were present in Oaxaca for the
SPA meeting!
The 35th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their
Applications was organized under the auspices of the Bernoulli
Society and co-sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics. It took place in the city of Oaxaca, Mexico from the 19th
to the 24th of June 2011. The SPA conference is the major annual
meeting for researchers working in the field of Stochastic Processes
and their Applications. The Oaxaca conference gathered 275 participants from 32 different countries.
The conference was hosted by the Oaxacan branch of the
Instituto de Matemáticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México and was co-organized by several Mexican research
centres in probability.
The organization of the Conference was perfect. As soon as
participants arrived at Oaxaca Airport (sometimes very late in
the evening), they were met by members of the local organizing
Committee who took care of them, and helped arrange transport
to their hotel. On Sunday, the registration at Hotel Mision Los
Angeles was followed by a small reception
with very good tequila (Tequila Sauza was
one of the sponsors of the Conference!).
Conference material was provided to every
participant in a nice Mexican bag (featuring
a design of the celebrated Oaxacan painter
Francisco Toledo) and contained all desirable information about the program and
the city of Oaxaca. Let me add that all the
contents (even the pen!) were recyclable.
The 20 invited plenary lectures were
presented by leading experts in their fields
and took place in the Teatro Juarez, near to
Traditional dancers entertained the participants at the conference dinner
the Hotel Mision. These lectures covered a
In addition, the city of Oaxaca, was very safe and offered a great
wide range of active research areas: random trees and graphs, percovariety of interesting places where the participants could rest after
lation, statistical mechanics and the Ising model, random matrices,
stochastic networks, control theory, stochastic differential equations the conference.
Warm thanks to the local organizing committee, who did a
and more (the full program is on the conference website).
wonderful job under the coordination of María Emilia Caballero
The program featured two IMS Medallion lectures, by Itai
and Víctor Rivero.
Benjamini on recurrence problems for random walks, and Alice
The conference website (with program details) is located at
Guionnet on random matrices. Ruth Williams delivered the Doob
lecture and reported on recent results on the analysis of stochastic
http://www.matem.unam.mx/~SPA2011/
16 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
Brazilian Journal celebrates 25th anniversary
The Brazilian Journal of Probability and
Statistics (BJPS) is an official publication
of the Brazilian Statistical Association and
is supported by the IMS. Currently three
issues a year, with four planned, the journal
publishes papers in applied probability,
applied statistics, computational statistics,
mathematical statistics, probability theory
and stochastic processes. Subscription is
$100 for IMS members. See http://www.
imstat.org/bjps/subscriptions.html
BJPS is marking its quarter-century
with a special anniversary issue (Vol. 25,
No. 3, 237–238). The Preface of this issue,
reproduced with permission, reads:
“The current issue celebrates the 25th
anniversary of the Brazilian Journal of
Probability and Statistics, an academic
journal published by the Brazilian Statistical
Association since 1987. The journal
publishes high-quality research papers in
applied probability, applied statistics, computational statistics, mathematical statistics,
probability theory and stochastic processes.
Previous chief editors are Pedro A.
Morettin, Heleno Bolfarine and Gauss M.
Cordeiro. Previous theory and methods editors are Gauss M. Cordeiro, Bent Jørgensen
and Chang C. Y. Dorea, and previous
applications editors are Julio M. Singer and
Jorge Achcar. (Anthony Davison was theory
and methods editor for a brief period, prior
to assuming the editorship of Biometrika.)
We took over the journal in 2007. In the
following year, an agreement between the
Brazilian Statistical Association and the
Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS)
was established which resulted in the BJPS
being an IMS-supported journal (since
2008). This change resulted in a faster and
more convenient refereeing process through
an electronic management system of submissions and also in wider indexation. As a
consequence, in 2010, the number of issues
in each volume was increased from two to
three. These are published in March, July
and November. Our goal is to publish four
issues per year, which is expected to happen
in the near future. In April 2011, BJPS
was included in the Scopus bibliographic
database. We firmly believe that the BJPS
will continue its pursuit of excellence in the
years to come.
“This anniversary issue contains papers
by outstanding researchers. They cover
important topics in probability and statistics. The papers below [see box]make up the
current BJPS issue.
“We would like to take the opportunity
to thank the authors of the papers that
make up this anniversary issue. We also
thank all previous editors for their hard
work, the Brazilian Statistical Association,
the partial funding received from
CNPq and CAPES, and the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics. The publication
of the current special issue was partially
funded by the INCTMat grant, and for
that we thank Professor Jacob Palis. Finally,
a special recognition goes to Professor
Wilton Bussab (in memoriam), who was
the president of the Brazilian Statistical
Association when the agreement with the
IMS was signed.”
Silvia L. P. Ferrari (Chief editor);
Francisco Cribari-Neto (Applications
editor); and Nancy L. Garcia (Theory and
Methods editor)
Contents of BJPS special anniversary issue (Volume 25, Issue 3)
Additive models for quantile regression: Model selection and confidence
bandaids, by Roger Koenker
Dispersion models for geometric sums, by Bent Jørgensen and
Célestin C. Kokonendji
Stationary infinitely divisible processes, by Ole Eiler BarndorffNielsen
Limit theorems for empirical Fréchet means of independent and nonidentically distributed manifold-valued random variables, by Wilfrid
Stephen Kendall and Huiling Le
Prediction-based estimating functions: Review and new developments,
by Michael Sørensen
Local linear suppression for wireless sensor network data, by Kristian
Lum and Alan E. Gelfand
Modelling particles moving in a potential field with pairwise
interactions and an application, by David Brillinger, H. K. Preisler
and M. J. Wisdom
Hierarchical wavelet modelling of environmental sensor data, by
Anthony Davison and Yann Ruffieux
On improved estimation for importance sampling, by David Firth
On default priors and approximate location models, by Donald Fraser
and Nancy Reid
Contiguity and irreconcilable nonstandard asymptotics of statistical
tests, by Pranab Kumar Sen and Antonio C. Pedroso-de-Lima
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 17
Terence’s Stuff: Speaking, reading, writing
Terry Speed knows
the importance of
good communication.
He is inspired by a
beautiful little book
by R.D. Richardson: on
Emerson, on writing
I
n our business, communication is
important. It is no exaggeration to
say that in our careers we sink, tread
water or swim according to our ability to
communicate. Suppose that you are giving a
presentation, and I am in your audience. At
the start, you have my complete attention.
I come expecting and hoping for a good
experience, to learn something from you,
and to enjoy myself. If I understand the
words you use, the sentences you form, and
the chains of reasoning you construct, and
if I can read and follow the material you
display, there is a good chance I’ll stay with
you, perhaps to the end. If I struggle with
any of these aspects of your presentation,
I’ll expect extra value for the extra effort.
Otherwise, I’ll probably tune out.
Communication is a two-way process
most of the time, but not when you’re in
front, and I’m at the back. The onus is on
you to lure me, hook me, draw me in, and
eventually to land me. Actors, politicians,
salespersons and evangelists all know this;
so should we.
Suppose that you have written a paper
and I am one of your potential readers.
Your title catches my attention. “This looks
interesting,” I think, and I read the abstract.
Is this paper worth reading carefully, I
wonder, as I read through the introduction.
Do you get—and keep—my attention, as
you might if we were face to face? That
depends, both on my need to read your
paper, and on your writing. Again it is your
words, sentences, and chains of reasoning
that matter, and again, I’ll stay with you
if I’m learning and enjoying myself… and
drift away if I’m not.
Few of us are naturally gifted speakers or writers. Most have to work hard
at it, and keep doing so. I’ll assume that
applies to you, as it does to me and almost
everyone else I know. How do we improve
our speaking and writing? One answer is by
taking formal college or university courses,
for example, on language and literature,
public speaking, technical or creative writing. There we can get instruction, practice
and feedback. I always encourage people for
whom it is feasible to consider this option,
that is, to seek professional help. Another
approach is to dive into the “how to” books
on speaking and writing, though I can’t
comment on the value of this strategy.
We can also help ourselves. There are
two aspects to my self-help approach.
One is like the way to get to Carnegie
Hall—practice, practice, practice—and the
other is reading. Ralph Waldo Emerson
believed that first we read, then we write [the
title of the Richardson book on Emerson]
and gave the following writing tip: “Read
for five hours a day.” Most of us are unlikely
to have our days as free for reading as his
were, so for us the question is: what should
we read? Life is short, so my answer here
is unequivocal. Read only good writing for
fun and profit, and read mediocre or poor
writing only when absolutely necessary.
Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, G. H. Hardy
and Marcia Angell all write magnificently.
Articles in the New York Review of Books
are invariably extremely well written, as are
those in Granta. Several of our professional
colleagues wrote beautifully: Florence
Nightingale David, William Feller, and
David Freedman; and the mathematical
and statistical biographer Constance Reid.
Apologies here to speakers of other languages for my focus on English. I can mention Jacques Neveu or Paul-André Meyer
as French masters of writing, but that’s my
limit in other languages. There is a lot of
great writing out there, mostly by professional writers, of course, but they should be
our role models. Read and emulate them.
Like Emerson, I see the reading of good
writing as key to improving our speaking
and writing. It helps us form what we want
to say or write. Next comes the practice.
Suppose you have a good first draft of your
talk or paper. You now need feedback:
how good is it, and in what ways can it be
improved? Here is where you must rely on
colleagues, friends or mentors, unselfish
people who are willing to spend their time
helping you improve your speaking or
writing. Such people aren’t as hard to find
as you might think, but you should be
prepared to return the favour. Once started,
you then iterate the cycle of draft, receive
feedback, revise. It’s always hard, but there
can be great satisfaction at the end: a talk
well delivered, a paper flying through the
review process. Let’s give Emerson the last
word: Happy is he … who writes from the
love of imparting certain thoughts … who
writes always to the unknown friend.
“The first rule of writing is not to omit the thing you meant
to say.” Sage advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson [left],
who may still be able to teach us a thing or two about
communication.
18 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
IMS meetings around the world
IMS Annual Meetings, 2012 & 2014
IMS sponsored meeting
IMS sponsored
meeting
2012 World Congress/IMS Annual Meeting
July 9–14, 2012
Grand Cevahir Hotel & Convention Center, Istanbul, Turkey
w http://www.worldcong2012.org/
The eighth World Congress in Probability and Statistics will be held in Istanbul from
July 9 to 14, 2012. It is jointly organized by the Bernoulli Society and the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics. Scheduled every four years, this meeting is a major worldwide
event for statistics and probability, covering all its branches, including theoretical, methodological, applied and computational statistics and probability, and stochastic processes. It
features the latest scientific developments in these fields.
Contacts: Elvan Ceyhan and Mine Çağlar, Co-chairs of the Local Organizing
Committee; Arnoldo Frigessi, Chair of the Program Committee.
2014 IMS Annual
Meeting
July 7–11, 2014
Sydney, Australia
w TBC
The location for the
2014 IMS Annual
Meeting has been
selected as Sydney,
Australia. Details
will follow, but
you can mark your
calendars now!
At a glance:
forthcoming
IMS Annual
Meeting and
JSM dates
2012
IMS Annual Meeting
@ World Congress:
İstanbul, Turkey,
July 9–14, 2012
w http://www.
worldcong2012.org/
JSM: San Diego,
CA, July 28–
August 2, 2012 Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge connects Europe (on the left) and Asia (right)
w http://amstat.
org/meetings/
Joint Statistical Meetings, 2012–2015
IMS sponsored meeting
IMS sponsored meeting
2012 Joint Statistical Meetings
July 28 – August 2, 2012
San Diego, CA
IMS Annual Meeting @ 2013 JSM
August 3–8, 2013
Montréal, Quebec, Canada
w http://amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2012/
w http://amstat.org/meetings/jsm/
IMS Invited Program: Hans Mueller, University of California,
Davis e mueller@wald.ucdavis.edu; IMS Contributed Program: Fang
Yao, University of Toronto e fyao2001@gmail.com
Key dates
September 7: Invited session proposal submission deadline
September 30: CE proposal deadline
December 21: Invited Program online
January 13: CTW proposal deadline
February 1: Deadline for submission of abstracts for IOLs, Invited
posters, Topic-Contributed and Regular Contributed abstracts, and
Roundtables
May 10: Draft manuscript deadline
IMS sponsored meeting
2014 Joint Statistical Meetings
August 2–7, 2014
Boston, Mass., USA
w http://amstat.org/meetings/jsm/
IMS sponsored meeting
IMS Annual Meeting @ 2015 JSM
August 8–13, 2015
Seattle, Washington, USA
w http://amstat.org/meetings/jsm/
jsm/2012/
2013
IMS Annual Meeting
@ JSM: Montréal,
Canada, August
3–8, 2013
2014
IMS Annual Meeting:
Sydney, Australia,
July 7–11, 2014
JSM: Boston, MA,
August 2–7, 2014
2015
IMS Annual Meeting
@ JSM: Seattle, WA,
August 8–13, 2015
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 19
ENAR, 2012–2014
IMS co-sponsored meeting
The Second IMS Asia Pacific Rim Meeting
July 1–4, 2012
Tsukuba, Japan
IMS sponsored meeting
w http://www.ims-aprm2012.org/
2012 ENAR/IMS Spring Meeting
April 1–4, 2012
Washington DC, USA
Program Chairs: Byeong U. Park e bupark@stats.snu.ac.kr), Runze Li e rli@stat.psu.edu
w http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm
Meeting postponed from 2011
Since the massive earthquake struck Japan on March 11, the local organizing committee and the scientific program committee decided to postpone the meeting until next
year. We have rescheduled it to July 1–4, 2012, and moved it to Tsukuba, the science
city and academic center of Japan, which is about 60km from Tokyo.
We hereby cordially invite you all to attend the meeting next year, when we are
certain that you will witness a strong recovery of Japan from one of the most severe
natural disasters in recent history.
Akimichi Takemura, LOC Chair; Byeong Park & Runze Li, SC Co-Chairs
IMS co-sponsored meeting
IMS sponsored meeting
2013 ENAR/IMS Spring Meeting
March 10–13, 2013
Orlando, Florida, USA
w http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm
IMS sponsored meeting
2014 ENAR/IMS Spring Meeting
March 16–19, 2014
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
w http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm
Colloquium in honor of Hans Rudolf Künsch on the occasion of his 60th birthday
October 3–4, 2011, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
IMS Reps: Peter Bühlmann, Marloes Maathuis, Sara van de Geer
IMS co-sponsored meeting
w https://stat.ethz.ch/events/Colloquium_Kuensch
International Symposium in Statistics (ISS)
on Longitudinal Data Analysis Subject
to Outliers, Measurement Errors, and/or
Missing Values
July 16–18, 2012
Memorial University, St. John’s, Canada
Keynote speakers are Jim Berger (Duke University), Stuart Geman
(Brown University), Peter Green (University of Bristol). Invited
speakers are: Rainer Dahlhaus (University of Heidelberg), Arnoldo
Frigessi (University of Oslo), Reinhard Furrer (University of
Zurich), Havard Rue (Norwegian Univ. S&T Trondheim), Reto
Knutti (ETH Zurich), Christian P. Robert (Université ParisDauphine).
Hans R. Künsch
w www.iss-2012-stjohns.ca
IMS Rep: Brajendra Sutradhar
IMS co-sponsored meeting
IMS co-sponsored meeting
International Statistics Conference 2011
December 28–30, 2011, Colombo, Sri Lanka
International Conference Ars Conjectandi 1713–2013
October 15–16, 2013
Basel, Switzerland
w TBC
IMS Rep: Peter Hall. Organized by the Applied Statistics
Association of Sri Lanka (ASASL). The meeting location is at the
water’s edge in the capital city of Sri Lanka.
IMS co-sponsored meeting
36th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications
July 29 – August 2, 2013
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
w TBC
w http://www.statoo.ch/bernoulli13/
2013 marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Jacob
Bernoulli’s book, Ars Conjectandi, in 1713. A meeting has been
organized to celebrate this: the “International Conference Ars
Conjectandi 1713–2013” will be held October 15–16, 2013, in
Basel, Switzerland.
IMS Representatives on the program committee are Hans
Künsch and Lutz Dümbgen.
20 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
Other meetings around the world
PIMS-Mprime Summer School in Probability
June 4–29, 2012
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
NEW
Contemporary Issues and Applications of Statistics
January 2–4, 2012
Kolkata, India
NEW
w http://www.math.ubc.ca/Links/ssprob12/
w http://www.isical.ac.in/~cias
This sixth school will feature two introductory courses, by Gregory
Miermont on planar maps and by Omer Angel on interacting
particle systems. Additionally, there will be a number of invited
lectures and presentations by participants.
The visionary Prof. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis planted the seed
of statistics in India. He realized the importance of developing the
subject and founded the Indian Statistical Institute. As one of the
pioneers of policy-making after independence, he demonstrated
how applications of statistics can help solve problems across a wide
range of disciplines. He realized the need for interdisciplinary
research where applications of statistics played a pivotal role. This
endeavour often opened up many theoretical questions and led
to new ideas, results and even new directions for further research.
Honouring the vision of this legendary scientist, Indian Statistical
Institute is organizing this conference on “Contemporary Issues and
Applications of Statistics” (CIAS2012), to bring together statisticians and other scientists engaged in inter-disciplinary research
involving applications of statistics from different parts of the world,
and provide a platform for them to interact among themselves and
to share their thoughts on recent developments in different areas of
the subject. The success of the conference will definitely infuse further enthusiasm in statistical activities in India, particularly among
young researchers.
Contact: Saurabh Bhattacharya e cias@isical.ac.in
MCQMC 2012
February 13–17, 2012
Sydney, Australia
NEW
w http://www.mcqmc2012.unsw.edu.au/
The MCQMC Conference is a biennial meeting devoted to the
study of Monte Carlo (MC) and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, the relationships between the two classes of methods, and their
effective application in different areas.
International Conference on Trends and Perspectives in Linear
Statistical Inference [LinStat 2012], and the 21st International
Workshop on Matrices and Statistics [IWMS 2012]
July 16–20, 2012
Będlewo (near Poznań), Poland
NEW
w http://linstat2012.au.poznan.pl/
LinStat 2012 is the follow-up to the 2008 and 2010 editions held
in Będlewo, Poland and in Tomar, Portugal; and IWMS 2012 is the
21st workshop in the sequence.
The purpose of the meeting is to bring together researchers sharing an interest in a variety of aspects of statistics and its applications
as well as matrix analysis and its applications to statistics, and offer
them a possibility to discuss current developments in these subjects.
The conference will mainly focus on a number of topics. The
topics that have been selected so far include estimation, prediction
and testing in linear models, robustness of relevant statistical methods, estimation of variance components appearing in linear models,
generalizations to nonlinear models, design and analysis of experiments, including optimality and comparison of linear experiments,
and applications of matrix methods in statistics.
The work of young scientists is highly appreciated. The list of
Invited Speakers is opened by the winners of the Young Scientists
Awards of LinStat’2010. The Scientific Committee will award the
best presentation and best poster. The awarded will be Invited
Speakers at the next edition of LinStat.
SAMSI 2012–2013 Research Programs
NEW
Nonlocal Continuum Models (Summer Program)
July 17–20, 2012
Computational Advertising (Summer Program)
August 6–17, 2012
Data-Driven Decisions in Healthcare (Year-Long Program)
Opening Workshop August 26–29, 2012
Statistical and Computational Methodology for Massive Data Sets
(Year-Long Program)
Opening Workshop September 9–12, 2012
Opportunities to participate: visiting researchers, postdoctoral fellowships, graduate student fellowships and early career researchers.
Please see the advertisement on page 22.
For more information and to apply, visit w www.samsi.info
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 21
Employment Opportunities around the world
Australia: Parkville, Victoria
United States: Washington DC
The University of Melbourne, Dept of Mathematics and Statistics
Georgetown University, Department of Biostatistics
Lecturer (US equivalent: Assistant Professor)
in Biostatistics/Bioinformatics
Assistant Professor
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8385648
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8407272
United States: Washington DC
Canada: Waterloo, ON
U.S. Census Bureau
University of Waterloo
Associate Director for Demographic Programs
Actuarial Science – Tenure-Track
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8415657
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8516540
United States: West Lafayette, IN
Canada: Waterloo, ON
Purdue University, Department of Statistics
University of Waterloo
Assistant Professor
Biostatistics – Tenure-Track
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8545969
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8516498
United States: Williamstown, MA
Canada: Waterloo, ON
Williams College
University of Waterloo
Assistant Professor of Statistics
Statistics – Tenure-Track
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8397181
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8516413
United States: Brunswick, ME
France: Rennes
Bowdoin College, Department of Mathematics
ENSAI, National School for Statistics & Information Analysis
Statistics Position
Research Fellow Biostatistics
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8436857
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8515810
United States: Ann Arbor, MI
United States: Los Angeles, CA
University of Michigan, Department of Statistics
UCLA Department of Mathematics
Assistant Professor
Faculty Positions 2012-2013
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8341842
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8407075
United States: Columbia, MO
United States: Stanford, CA
University of Missouri, Department of Statistics
Stanford University
Assistant Professor
Faculty Opening
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8332793
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8516768
United States: Chapel Hill, NC
United States: Stanford, CA
UNC Department of Biostatistics
Stanford University
Post-doctoral Fellow
Stein Fellow
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8502143
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8432752
United States: Seattle, WA
United States: Stanford, CA
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Stanford University
Staff Scientist
Assistant Professor/Associate Professor
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8415680
http://jobs.imstat.org/c/job.cfm?site_id=1847&jb=8432735
::: Search our online database of the latest jobs around the world for free at http://jobs.imstat.org :::
22 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
Employment Opportunities around the world
Hong Kong: Kowloon
United States: Ithaca, New York
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Department of Mathematics
Faculty Position(s)
Cornell University Dept of Mathematics
The Department of Mathematics invites applications for tenure-track faculty position(s) at
the rank of Assistant Professor in all areas of mathematics. Other things being equal, preference will be given to areas consistent with the Department’s strategic planning.
Applicants should have a PhD degree and strong experience in research and teaching.
Applicants with exceptionally strong qualifications and experience in research and teaching
may be considered for position(s) above the Assistant Professor rank.
Starting rank and salary will depend on qualifications and experience. Fringe benefits
include medical/dental benefits and annual leave. Housing will be provided where applicable. Initial appointment will be on a three-year contract, renewal subject to mutual agreement. A gratuity will be payable upon successful completion of the contract.
Applications received on or before 31 December 2011 will be given full consideration
for appointment in 2012. Applications received afterwards will be considered subject
to the availability of position(s). Applicants should send their curriculum vitae together
with at least three research references and one teaching reference to the Human Resources
Office, HKUST, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Applicants for position(s) above
the Assistant Professor rank should send curriculum vitae and the names of at least three
research referees to the Human Resources Office. More information about the University
is available on the University’s homepage at http://www.ust.hk. (Information provided by
applicants will be used for recruitment and other employment-related purposes.)
The Department of Mathematics at Cornell
University invites applications for two H.C.
Wang Assistant Professors, non-renewable,
3-year position beginning July 1, 2012.
Successful candidates are expected to pursue
independent research at Cornell and teach
three courses per year. A PhD in mathematics is required. The Department actively
encourages applications from women and
minority candidates. Applicants must apply
electronically at http://www.mathjobs.org.
For information about our positions and
application instructions, see http://www.
math.cornell.edu/Positions/positions.html.
Applicants will be automatically considered
for all eligible positions.
Deadline December 1, 2011. Early
applications will be regarded favorably.
Cornell University is an Affirmative Action/
Equal Opportunity Employer and Educator.
United States: Research Triangle Park, NC
Announcing the SAMSI 2012 - 2013 Research Programs
Nonlocal Continuum Models (Summer Program)
July 17 - 20, 2012
Computational Advertising (Summer Program)
August 6 - 17, 2012
Data-Driven Decisions in Healthcare (Year-Long Program)
Opening Workshop August 26 - 29, 2012
Statistical and Computational Methodology for Massive Data Sets
(Year-Long Program)
Opening Workshop September 9 - 12, 2012
Opportunities to Participate:
•Visiting Researchers
•Postdoctoral Fellowships
•Graduate Student Fellowships
•Early Career Researchers
For more information and to apply, visit www.samsi.info
::: Advertise current job opportunities for only $250 for 60 days ::: See http://jobs.imstat.org for details :::
September . 2011
IMS Bulletin . 23
USA: Atlanta, GA
Georgia Tech
The School of
Mathematics at
Georgia Tech is
accepting applications for faculty
positions at all ranks
and in all areas of
pure and applied
mathematics and
statistics.
Applications by
highly qualified candidates from groups
underrepresented in
the mathematical
sciences are particularly encouraged.
See
www.math.gatech.
edu/resources/
employment
for more details and
application instructions.
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            


            
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            


           



            


          
            
            
          
        

              


                
            
             
             
          



              
            


United States: Ithaca, New York
Cornell University, Department of Mathematics
The Department of Mathematics at Cornell University invites applications for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions, or higher
rank, pending administrative approval, starting July 1, 2012. The searches are open to all areas of Mathematics with an emphasis on the
areas of probability, number theory, and PDE. The Department actively encourages applications from women and minority candidates.
Applicants must apply electronically at http://www.mathjobs.org. For information about our positions and application instructions, see:
http://www.math.cornell.edu/Positions/positions.html. Applicants will be automatically considered for all eligible positions.
Deadline November 1, 2011. Early applications will be regarded favorably. Cornell University is an Affirmative Action/Equal
Opportunity Employer and Educator.
::: Search our online database of the latest jobs around the world for free at http://jobs.imstat.org :::
24 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
International Calendar of Statistical Events
IMS meetings are highlighted in maroon with the
logo, and new or updated entries have the NEW or UPDATED symbol. t means
telephone, f fax, e email and w website. Please submit your meeting details and any corrections to Elyse Gustafson at erg@imstat.org
September 2011
September 5–9: Lisbon, Portugal. 17th European Young
Statisticians Meeting w http://www.fct.unl.pt/17eysm
September 7–8: Statistical Center of Statistics Korea, Daejeon,
South Korea. Third International Workshop on Internet Survey
Methods w www.kostat.go.kr
September 12–16: Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Columbus,
Ohio. Workshop on New Questions in Probability Theory Arising
in Biological Systems w http://mbi.osu.edu/2011/ws1description.html
September 12 – December 16: Institute for Pure and
October 23–27: Pucón, Chile. Third Latin American Meeting on
Bayesian Statistics (COBAL) and XXXVIII Chilean National
Meeting of Statistics (JNE) w http://cobal2011.usach.cl
October 24–26: Knoxville, TN, USA. NIMBioS Investigative
Workshop: Mathematical Modeling of Intracellular Movements w http://nimbios.org/workshops/WS_intracellular_mv.html
October 28–30: Prague, Czech Republic. Analytical Methods in
Statistics (AMISTAT) w http://amistat2011.karlin.mff.cuni.cz
November 2011
November 7–9: Łódź, Poland. Multivariate Statistical Analysis
Applied Mathematics, Los Angeles, USA. Mathematical and
Computational Approaches in High-Throughput Genomics
Conference w http://www.msa.uni.lodz.pl
w www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/gen2011/
November 25–27: Lahore, Pakistan. 3rd International Conference
September 13–16: Jaca, Spain. Statistics, Probability and
Operations Research (SPO 2011) w http://metodosestadisticos.
on Statistical Sciences w http://www.icss3.co.nr/
unizar.es/~jaca2011
December 2011
September 24: Cambridge, MA. 2011 New England Symposium
on Statistics in Sports w http://www.amstat.org/chapters/boston/
December 18–21: Amman, Jordan. 11th Islamic Countries
Conference on Statistical Sciences (ICCS-11) w http://www.iccs11.
nessis11.html
isoss.net/
September 25–28: Ribno, Bled, Slovenia. Applied Statistics 2011 w
December 28–30: Colombo, Sri Lanka. International
http://conferences.nib.si/AS2011
Statistics Conference 2011. w TBC
September 26–27: Birmingham, Alabama. Statistical Analyses for
December 28–31: Hong Kong, China. International Conference
Next Generation Sequencing w http://www.soph.uab.edu/ssg/
courses/nhgri_r13/ngsstat
on Advances in Probability and Statistics Theory and Applications: A celebration of N. Balakrishnan’s 30 years of contributions
to statistics. e icaps2011@gmail.com w http://faculty.smu.edu/ngh/
October 2011
icaps2011.html
October 3–4: ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Colloquium in
honor of Hans Rudolf Künsch on the occasion of his 60th birthday w https://stat.ethz.ch/events/Colloquium_Kuensch
October 12–14: Washington DC/ Silver Spring MD. Conference
on Risk Assessment and Evaluation of Predictions w http://brac.
umd.edu/~Risk2011/Main.htm
October 18–20: Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Mass. 2011
Non-clinical Biostatistics Conference w http://www.hsph.harvard.
edu/ncb2011/
January 2012
January 1–6: Hyderabad, India. 22nd Annual Conference of The
International Environmetrics Society w www.ties2012.com/
NEW
January 2–4: Kolkata, India. Contemporary Issues and
Applications of Statistics (CIAS2012) w http://www.isical.ac.in/~cias
September . 2011
January 23–27: Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques
(CIRM), Marseille, France. Concentration inequalities and their
applications w http://www.cirm.univ-mrs.fr/
February 2012
NEW
February 13–17: Sydney, Australia. MCQMC 2012 w http://
www.mcqmc2012.unsw.edu.au/
April 2012
April 1–4: Washington DC, USA. 2012 ENAR/IMS Spring
Meetings. w http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm
IMS Bulletin . 25
March 2012
March 14–16: Hong Kong. IAENG International Conference on
Data Mining and Applications 2012 w www.iaeng.org/IMECS2012/
ICDMA2012.html
March 30–31: Washington DC. Information and Econometrics
of Networks w www.american.edu/cas/economics/info-metrics/
workshop/workshop-2012-spring.cfm
June 2012
June 3–6: Guelph, Ontario, Canada. SSC Annual Meeting w TBC
NEW
April 18–20: Poznań, Poland. International Congress of Polish
Statistics to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Polish Statistical
Association w http://www.stat.gov.pl/pts/
June 4–29: University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
Canada. PIMS-Mprime Summer School in Probability w http://
www.math.ubc.ca/Links/ssprob12/
June 18–22: MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA. The 2012 Stochastic
Networks Conference w http://stoch-nets-2012.lids.mit.edu/
Meeting organizer’s to do list
June 23–26: Boston, MA, USA. ICSA 2012 Applied Statistics
Symposium. w TBC
June 25–29: Kyoto, Japan. 2012 ISBA World Meeting
w http://www2.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~isba2012/
July 2012
July 1–4: Tsukuba, Japan. IMS Asia Pacific Rim Meetings. w
http://www.ims-aprm2012.org/ (meeting postponed from July 2011
due to the earthquake)
July 3–6: University of Oslo, Norway. Third biennial
International Statistical Ecology Conference w http://www.cees.uio.no/news/2010/isec2012.html
July 9–14: Istanbul, Turkey. IMS Annual Meeting 2012 in
conjunction with 8th World Congress in Probability and Statistics.
w http://www.worldcong2012.org/
Continues on page 26
26 . IMS Bulletin
Volume 40 . Issue 6
International Calendar continued
July 2012 continued
July 16–18: Memorial University, St. John’s, Canada. Inter-
national Symposium in Statistics (ISS) on Longitudinal Data
Analysis Subject to Outliers, Measurement Errors, and/or Missing
Values w www.iss-2012-stjohns.ca
NEW
August 3–8: Montréal, Canada. IMS Annual Meeting at
JSM2013. w http://amstat.org/meetings/jsm/
August 24–31: Hong Kong. International Statistical Institute: 59th
ISI World Statistics Congress w www.isi2013.hk
July 16–20: Będlewo (near Poznań), Poland. International
Conference on Trends and Perspectives in Linear Statistical Inference [LinStat 2012], and 21st International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics [IWMS 2012] w http://linstat2012.au.poznan.pl/
NEW
August 2013
July 17–20: SAMSI, NC, USA. Nonlocal Continuum Mod-
els [SAMSI Research Program] w www.samsi.info
July 28 – August 2: San Diego, California. JSM2012.
w http://amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2012/index.cfm
October 2013
October 15–16: Basel, Switzerland. International Conference
Ars Conjectandi 1713–2013 w http://www.statoo.ch/bernoulli13/
March 2014
March 16–19: Baltimore, Maryland. 2014 ENAR/IMS Spring
Meeting. w http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm
August 2012
NEW
August 6–17: SAMSI, NC, USA. Computational Advertis-
ing [SAMSI Research Program] w www.samsi.info
August 26–29: SAMSI, NC, USA. Data-Driven Decisions
in Healthcare [SAMSI Research Program] Opening Workshop w
July 2014
July 7–11: Sydney, Australia. 2014 IMS Annual Meeting.
w TBC
NEW
www.samsi.info
August 2014
August 2–7: Boston, MA. JSM2014 and ASA’s 175th
September 2012
September 9–12: SAMSI, NC, USA. Statistical and Computational Methodology for Massive Data Sets [SAMSI Research
Program] Opening Workshop w www.samsi.info
NEW
Anniversary. w TBC
August 2015
August 8–13: Seattle, WA. JSM2015. w TBC
March 2013
March 10–13: Orlando, Florida. 2013 ENAR/IMS Spring
Meeting. w http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm
July 2013
July 29 – August 2: University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.
36th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications w
TBC
Are we missing something? If you know of
any statistics or probability meetings which
aren’t listed here, please let us know. Email
the details to Elyse Gustafson at erg@imstat.
org. We’ll list them here in the
Bulletin, and online too, at
www.imstat.org/meetings
September . 2011
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Volume 40 . Issue 6
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PROBABILITY
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September 15,
then November 1
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submissions
THE ANNALS
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DEADLINES
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Read it online at
the new website:
bulletin.imstat.org
AN OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE
I NSTITUTE OF M ATHEMATICAL S TATISTICS
Articles
The TASEP speed process . . . . . . G IDEON A MIR , O MER A NGEL AND B ENEDEK VALKÓ
Loop-erased random walk and Poisson kernel on planar graphs
A RIEL YADIN AND A MIR Y EHUDAYOFF
On monochromatic arm exponents for 2D critical percolation
V INCENT B EFFARA AND P IERRE N OLIN
Some stochastic process without birth, linked to the mean curvature flow
KOLÉHÈ A. C OULIBALY-PASQUIER
Markov processes on time-like graphs . . . . . . . . K RZYSZTOF B URDZY AND S OUMIK PAL
Reconstruction for the Potts model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A LLAN S LY
Lack of strong completeness for stochastic flows
X UE -M EI L I AND M ICHAEL S CHEUTZOW
Backward stochastic dynamics on a filtered probability space
G ECHUN L IANG , T ERRY LYONS AND Z HONGMIN Q IAN
Harnack inequality for SDE with multiplicative noise and extension to Neumann
semigroup on nonconvex manifolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . F ENG -Y U WANG
The regularizing effects of resetting in a particle system for the Burgers equation
G AUTAM I YER AND A LEXEI N OVIKOV
A probabilistic approach to Dirichlet problems of semilinear elliptic PDEs
with singular coefficients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T USHENG Z HANG
Concentration of the information in data with log-concave distributions
S ERGEY B OBKOV AND M OKSHAY M ADIMAN
Spectrum of large random reversible Markov chains: Heavy-tailed weights on the
complete graph . . . C HARLES B ORDENAVE , P IETRO C APUTO AND D JALIL C HAFAÏ
Approximating the moments of marginals of high-dimensional distributions
ROMAN V ERSHYNIN
Convergence of joint moments for independent random patterned matrices
A RUP B OSE , R AJAT S UBHRA H AZRA AND KOUSHIK S AHA
Vol. 39, No. 4—July 2011
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