A Celebration in Memory of Ross Leadbetter

November 26, 2022

The Department is organizing a meeting on Saturday, February 25, 2023.
See more information in the event website.

Speakers

Richard Davis (Columbia University)
Ivette Gomes (Universidade de Lisboa)
Tailen Hsing (University of Michigan)
Steve Marron (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Thomas Mikosch (University of Copenhagen)
Susan Murphy (Harvard University)
Vladas Pipiras (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Sid Resnick (Cornell University)
Holger Rootzen (Chalmers University of Technology)
Gennady Samorodnitsky (Cornell University)

RTG Women Luncheon: Lisa M. LaVange

October 21, 2022

Each semester the RTG program will host a luncheon for women trainees with a faculty role model, from within or outside UNC, to share and discuss unique challenges, experiences, and opportunities for women in STEM.

This semester the luncheon will be held on November 21st from 12:45pm to 2:00pm at Campus Y seminar rooms (207&208). We will have Lisa M. LaVange from Biostatistics as the faculty role model joining the lunch. She is a professor and chair of the Department of Biostatistics at UNC Chapel Hill. She also serves as the director of UNC’s Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (2006-2011; 2018-present). Dr. LaVange has a broad background in the biostatistics field, including leadership roles in industry (RTI, Quintiles, Inspire Pharmaceuticals); academia (UNC/CSCC); and government (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA). She was also the 2018 president of the American Statistical Association. At the CSCC, she has been the lead PI on the HCHS/SOL and SPIROMICS studies, and is currently the Coordinating Center PI for the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Intervention (ATN) and co-PI of the Precision Interventions for Severe and/or Exacerbation-Prone Asthma Network (PrecISE). She is co-instructor for BIOS 844: Leadership in Biostatistics, offered bi-yearly in the fall semester.

Doing Good With OM and OR

October 19, 2022

Nilay Argon is speaking on the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC) academic conference on Friday, October 28, 2022, “Doing Good With OM and OR”.

Title: Disparities in Prioritization and Disposition Decisions in Emergency Departments

Abstract: Prior research has shown that health disparities exist in various forms in Emergency Departments (EDs), where certain patient populations have longer wait times, lower medical resource usage, and higher mortality rates. In this talk, I will discuss disparities in two ED decisions that have not received much attention before: prioritization for rooming after triage and disposition decision. Using data from a large academic ED, we identified patient age and race as characteristics that are associated with deviation from a first-come-first-served prioritization rule among patients with a similar triage acuity. We also found that ED disposition decisions, specifically whether or not a patient is admitted to the hospital after their ED stay, correlated with patient sex, race, and ethnicity. These findings suggest that there may be demographic disparities in ED rooming and disposition decisions after adjusting for clinical characteristics. Our results also support the hypothesis that there is an association between these disparities and ED crowding. I will conclude my talk with our ongoing work on solutions to diminish the effects of such disparities in EDs.

Available Faculty Positions

October 3, 2022

The Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has openings for two tenure-track positions at the assistant professor level in the areas of optimization and theoretical statistics starting July 1, 2023.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and welcomes all to apply without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or veteran status.

We will begin considering candidates after November 1, 2022, and will continue accepting applications until the position is filled. The application package should include a cover letter, an up-to-date curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements, representative papers, and a graduate transcript. Applicants should arrange for four letters of recommendation. At least one of the letters should include an evaluation of the applicant’s teaching ability. Application materials and letters must be submitted in electronic form only.

Assistant Professorship in Optimization

The department is seeking candidates with a doctorate in a relevant field, strong training in mathematical optimization, and the potential to maintain a strong research program in this area. The successful candidates will be comfortable with teaching courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels in the department at the intersection of their expertise and the needs of the department. A commitment to application-oriented and interdisciplinary research, and to interaction with other groups in the department will be a positive factor in the consideration of candidates.

• Click on https://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/241867 to apply for this position.
• For inquiries, please contact stor-search-optim@unc.edu

Assistant Professorship in Statistics

Candidates are required to have a doctorate in statistics or a related field by the start date of the appointment. The Department is seeking candidates who have strong training and an established research record in theoretical statistics or theoretical machine learning. The successful candidate will be comfortable with teaching courses in theoretical statistics at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as introductory courses in the department. The potential for interaction with other groups in the department and the university will be a positive factor in the consideration of candidates.

• Click on https://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/241869 to apply for this position.
• Questions about this position should be directed to stor-search-stats@unc.edu

Liu awarded NSF grant

September 30, 2022

Professor Yufeng Liu recently received an NSF grant along with Professor. Wei Sun at Purdue University.  The title of the 3-year grant is “Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning for Online Decision Making”.

This research project will advance the frontiers of modern reinforcement learning for online decision-making problems. Reinforcement learning deals with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an uncertain environment in order to maximize the cumulative reward. It has achieved phenomenal success in diverse business and scientific fields. However, less attention has been paid to the trustworthy aspects of reinforcement learning. This project will investigate different aspects of trustworthy issues like robustness, fairness, causality, and explainability in important online decision-making tasks. The results of this research will benefit many different fields such as statistics, machine learning, operations research, marketing, economics, and finance. Open-source software will be developed to provide applied researchers with cutting-edge tools. The project will recruit students, especially those from unrepresented groups, to be involved in the research and will develop new courses on statistical reinforcement learning and decision making.

This research project will focus on three interconnected trustworthy reinforcement learning methods for online decision-making problems: dynamic pricing, dynamic assortment selection, and matching in two-sided markets. Issues of robustness, fairness, causality, and explainability will be addressed in these decision-making tasks, which will advance the exploration techniques used in existing reinforcement learning algorithms. The project will develop new theoretical tools to analyze the statistical properties of these modern reinforcement learning algorithms. Regret upper bounds and matching lower bound will be thoroughly investigated. One important goal of online decision making is to identify an optimal policy that maximizes the overall gain, based on the contextual information and historical interactions with the environment. Due to the complex nature of such problems, there is a high demand for trustworthy tools for learning optimal personalized policy in various settings. The knowledge gained from this research will benefit learning in online auctions and other complex market design problems.

STORies Newsletter – 2022

September 26, 2022

Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 2022 annual issue of STORies, which looks back at the department’s past academic year 2021/2022 and considers its outlook.

As the new academic year 2022/2023 is starting, the department feels like in the pre-pandemic times: more people around, few people wearing masks, and more socializing, with the lunch table again full of faculty and staff. Along similar lines, the faculty and graduate students have started going to in-person conferences, visiting collaborators and places, and vice versa, the department just hosted an in-person conference in probability and started seeing research visitors once again.

This is quite a change compared to the past academic year which was still quite disruptive: the delta and omicron waves, juggling in-person and remote teachings, accommodating sick students, hardly anyone in the department being spared by the virus. Getting to this point was not easy for many of us on multiple levels. The pandemic may still have surprises up its sleeve, but the overall sense here is that we are learning to live with the virus and have enough measures to counter its ill effects.

The pandemic aside, the department continued to evolve and grow over the past academic year. New faculty hiring took a lot of oxygen out of the departmental activities. With three tenure-track and one teaching-track lines – an unusually large number of search authorizations – it was the collective effort of the whole department (faculty, staff, and graduate students), and especially the committee chairs Profs. Smith and McLean, that resulted in successful hires of four excellent candidates. Their short bios and pictures are included in these STORies.

Through the past academic year, as well as through all my term, I have been reminded constantly of the research strengths and breadths of our amazing faculty.

a CAREER grant by Prof. Banerjee, a large RTG on networks led by Prof. Budhiraja, a big FRG led by Prof. K. Zhang, to name but a few in the last academic year. Their successes would not be possible without the contributions of our graduate students.

Faculty, staff, and graduate students dedicated service to running the department, and making it better have been another bright spot in my experience as the chair. The new academic year brings many personnel changes to various administrative roles in the department; Prof. Argon becoming the new DGS, Prof. Olvera-Cravioto the new DUS, Prof. Hannig the new DGA, amongst other changes. This is happening along with planned and unplanned staff turnover; the department recently welcomed its new manager Mrs. Weaver. Looking ahead at the new academic year 2022/2023, the department will continue pursuing some of its ongoing priorities related to data science, MS program, and department anniversary. Another theme that emerged over the last number of years is the growth of the department. This is bringing its own issues related to management, space, and other areas, that will continue needing our attention.

Do continue supporting the department in any way you can!

Vladas Pipiras
Department Chair

Read the entire newsletter

Welcome new faculty members

September 2, 2022

The Statistics and Operations Research Department would like to welcome our newest faculty members, Assistant Professors Guanting Chen, Zoe Huang and Michael O’Neill and teaching Assistant Professors Oluremi Abayomi!

Haixu Ma wins ASA award

September 1, 2022

STOR Ph.D. student Haixu Ma won the student paper competition award of the Biopharmaceutical Section of the American Statistical Association. He was invited to present the paper “Learning Optimal Group-structured Individualized Treatment Rules with Many Treatments” at the Joint Statistical Meeting in Washington, DC, this August.

This paper is a joint work with his advisors, Prof. Yufeng Liu, and Prof. Donglin Zeng from the Department of Biostatistics.

Professors awarded FRG grant

September 1, 2022

Kai Zhang (Principal Investigator) and Yao Li have been awarded a Focused Research Group (FRG) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) on “FRG: Collaborative Research: Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Compressible Data on Compressive Networks” with their collaborators. The project is for 3 years with a total award of $1,200,000, in which UNC is the lead institution with $800,000. Check the FRG website for more information.

Mini course by Philippe Robert

August 13, 2022

This Fall, we will have Philippe Robert from INRIA (France) visiting us Nov 9-18. He is a leading expert in large stochastic networks, their scaling limits, and applications to Biology.

He will give 5 two-hour lectures on Stochastic Calculus with Poisson processes and their application to Biology during Nov 10-17, 2022, at the following times and venues:

• TH 11/10 – Hanes 125, during 4:00-6:45
• F 11/11 – Hanes 120, during 3:30-5:45
• M 11/14 – Hanes 120, during 3:30-5:30
• W 11/16 – Hanes 120, during 3:30-5:30
• TF 11/17 – Hanes 125, during 4:00-6:45

This is part of the lecture series funded by the NSF RTG grant DMS 2134107.