Dr. Andrew Nobel received NSF collaboration grant on “Random dynamical systems and limit theorems for optimal tracking”

February 15, 2017

The proposed research investigates the structure of families of dynamical systems from two complementary points of view. The first point of view is the “forward problem,” in which one chooses a system at random from an ensemble of systems and describes its properties with high probability. The second point of view is the ”inverse problem,” in which one makes observations from an unknown system within a known family and attempts to recover some information about the unknown system from the observations. The research has three primary aims.
Aim 1: To describe the likely structural properties of dynamical systems that evolve according to randomly chosen rules.
Aim 2: To establish a rigorous theoretical foundation for the analysis of optimization problems and related statistical inference methodology for dynamical systems.
Aim 3: To develop a relative version of the thermodynamic formalism and investigate its connections to Bayesian inference.

Authors/roles: Kevin McGoff (PI), Sayan Mukherjee and Andrew Nobel (co-PIs)

Hannan gift

February 8, 2017

Department of Statistics and Operations Research received a generous gift from the estate of Dr. James Francis Hannan and Ms. Bettie Creighton Hannan that will support our recruitment and retention of top graduate students and faculty. We are grateful to the family of Dr. James Hannan and Ms. Bettie Hannan.  Dr. Hannan received his Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at UNC in 1953 under the direction of Dr. Herbert Robbins. Dr. Hannan reminisced fondly about his time in Chapel Hill as a graduate student in a very interesting interview that appeared in Statistical Science (https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1280841737).

Dr. Yufeng Liu given Breiman award

January 23, 2017

Professor Yufeng Liu was selected for the Inaugural Leo Breiman Junior Awards by the Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS) at ASA, for great impacts of his work in the area of SLDS. 

As an award recipient, Yufeng is invited to give an invited lecture with the senior awardee Grace Wahba and junior co-awardee Ming Yuan at JSM 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Two papers by STOR graduate students selected as winners in American Statistical Association competitions

January 20, 2017

Two of our graduate students, Jianyu Liu and Zhengling Qi, have won paper competitions sponsored by the American Statistical Association in 2017.

The paper by Zhengling Qi, titled D-learning to estimate optimal individual treatment rules and jointly written with Professor Yufeng Liu, has won the competition for the Biopharmaceutical section.

The paper by Jianyu Liu, titled Graph-based Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis for High-Dimensional Classification and jointly written with Professor Yufeng Liu and Guan Yu (an STOR alumni and currently an assistant professor at University at Buffalo), has won the competition for the section on Statistical Learning and Data Science.

The winners will present their papers at the 2017 Joint Statistical Meetings(JSM) at Baltimore, MD during 7/29-8/3 this year.

Dr. Jan Hannig explains lottery cheating in “What Matters in North Carolina”

December 9, 2016

Professor Hannig was a guest interview on “What Matters in North Carolina” to discuss his statistical assessment of people who have won the lottery multiple times.

Quick preview, one person who won 40+ times statistically would have had to spend $230,000 out of pocket.

Here is the link to the show. The segment is approximately at the 44 minute mark. 

http://freedomactionnetwork.com/index.php/2016/12/08/what-matters-for-thursday-december-08-2016/

Dr. Vladas Pipiras’ work on extreme values of ship motions is discussed in the US Navy news

October 17, 2016

Prof. Vladas Pipiras from the Department of Statistics and Operations Research has been collaborating with the US Navy and other researchers on understanding extreme values of ship motions. The work carried out by Prof. Pipiras as a visiting faculty at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, Maryland, is discussed in more detail in the US Navy news:

https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Media/News/Article/935526/visiting-faculty-provide-research-capabilities-at-carderock/

During his summer visits to the US Navy lab, Prof. Pipiras was joined by his Ph.D. student Dylan Glotzer, who has also become an essential contributor to several projects.

Dr. Jan Hannig explains lottery odds to The Charlotte Observer

September 30, 2016

Some NC lottery players win so often, their good fortune defies logic. Are they gaming the system? With a few other statisticians and analysts, Professor Jan Hannig from the Department of Statistics and Operations Research helps to explain the lottery odds in an article published in The Charlotte Observer. Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/special-reports/against-all-odds/article103038972.html

Welcome new faculty members

September 29, 2016

The Statistics and Operations Research Department would like to welcome our newest faculty members, Assistant Professors Nicolas Fraiman and Sayan Banerjee!

Dr. Banerjee received his undergraduate and masters education at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. He completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle, under Chris Burdzy, before going to England for a postdoctoral program at the University of Warwick with Wilfrid Kendall. His research interests lie in interacting particle systems, studying connections between probabilistic couplings and geometry, random walks in random environments and random matrices. When he is not working, he can be found humming along with his guitar.

Dr. Fraiman obtained his Ph.D. in 2013 from McGill University supervised by Luc Devroye. He then went on to postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania working with Robin Pemantle, and at Harvard University working with Martin Nowak. He is interested in probabilistic analysis of random structures, algorithms, and evolutionary dynamics.

Dr. Shankar Bhamidi’s first year seminar gets a visit from the Dean

September 28, 2016

Every year the STOR department offers a number of First Year Seminars. These are meant to introduce incoming first year students to cutting edge research in the disciplines of STOR. This year Dr. Shankar Bhamidi is teaching a course called “Risk and Uncertainty in the Real World”. As part of the course, Prof. Bhamidi occasionally gets distinguished researchers who are using state of the art techniques in statistics and probability in their own research. This week we had Prof. Kevin Guskiewicz, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Kenan distinguished professor in the department of Exercise and Sports Science come give a talk to the class (see the picture below) on the fundamental work his lab and department have conducted on concussion and traumatic brain injury among athletes.

Brief Bio of Prof. Guskiewicz, paraphrased from the UNC College of Arts and Sciences webpage:

Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, a neuroscientist and nationally recognized expert on sport-related concussions, became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences on Jan. 1, 2016. Previously, he had served as senior associate dean for the natural sciences and chair of the Department of Exercise and Sport Science in the College.

A 20-year member of Carolina’s faculty, Guskiewicz is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Exercise and Sport Science and co- director of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center and director of the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes. He holds appointments in the department of orthopaedics, department of physical medicine and rehabilitation, the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center and doctoral program in human movement science.

His research has also influenced concussion guidelines and recommendations made by these organizations as well as the NCAA and the NFL. In 2011, he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for his innovative work on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of sport-related concussions. He and his colleagues used that award to help improve safety in high school sports and to help the U.S. military identify and treat serious head injuries. In 2013, Time magazine named him a Game Changer, one of 18 “innovators and problem-solvers that are inspiring change in America.”

New research grants received by STOR faculty

September 23, 2016

With the start of the 2016-17 school year, faculty members in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research have received a number of new research grants from national research funds, to support their research in statistics and operations research with applications in biology, health care, data science and machine learning, and other areas.

Among the awardees, Professors Nilay Argon and Serhan Ziya have received an NSF collaborative research grant to study distribution of patients to medical facilities in mass casualty events. Professor Shankar Bhamidi has been award an NSF grant to study dynamic network models on entrance boundary and continuum scaling limits, condensation phenomena and probabilistic combinatorial optimization. Professor Yufeng Liu has received an NSF grant to organize the Conference on Statistical Machine Learning and Data Science, and an NSF collaborative research grant to do research on foundations of nonconvex problems in bigdata science and engineering on models, algorithms, and analysis.
Professors James Marron and Jan Hannig have been awarded a NSF grant to conduct research on statistical approaches to big data analytics. Professor Andrew Nobel has received an NSF grant to study random dynamical systems and limit theorems for optimal tracking, an NSF grant with Professor Shankar Bhamidi to study iterative testing procedures and high-dimensional scaling limits of extremal random structure, and an NIH grant with Professor Fred Wright to study multi-tissue and network models for next-generation EQTL. Professor Quoc Tran-Dinh has been awarded an NSF grant to study efficient methods for large scale self concordant convex minimization. Professor Yin Xia has received an NSF grant to do research on large-scale multiple testing for high-dimensional covariance structures with applications to genomics and neuroimaging. Professor Kai Zhang has received an NSF grant to study geometric perspectives on the correlation, and an NSF collaborative research grant for his research on statistical theory and methods beyond the dimensionality barrier.