News

IMS Bulletin - new issue

Volume 37 Issue 4 May 2008 is now available online. Table of Contents:

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NISS/ASA Writing Workshop for Junior Researchers

The National Institute of Statistical Science (NISS) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) will hold a writing workshop for junior researchers. The goal of the workshop is to provide instruction in how to write journal articles and grant proposals. Participants will be required to provide a recent sample of their writing, which will be reviewed by a senior mentor. The sample could be a current draft of an article being submitted for publication, or it could be a grant proposal. (Submission of the manuscript will be required as part of the registration process. Prior experience suggests that the best results come from submitting an early draft of something that is written solely or primarily by the participant.)

The mentors will be former journal editors and program officers, who will critique (a portion of) the submitted material. Individual feedback will be provided at the opening session, and participants will be expected to prepare a revision. In addition to the individual feedback, there will be a one-day session of general instruction in effective writing techniques and a follow-up lunch.

The one-day session is scheduled for Sunday, August 3, in Denver. At the end of the session, mentors will meet with participants to go over the writing samples they submitted. The participants will prepare a revision of the critiqued portion of their paper and give it to their mentor by Tuesday evening, August 5. A lunch will be held on Wednesday, August 6, by which time the participants will receive additional feedback on their revisions. The lunch will also be used to provide general feedback to the participants, mentors, and organizers.

Attendance will be limited and will depend on the number of mentors available. To apply, click on the tab below. Applications are due by June 1, 2008, and successful applicants will be notified by June 30. Applications received after June 1 will be considered if space is available. There is no fee for participation. Participants will receive lunch on Sunday, August 3, and Wednesday, August 6. Participants must agree to attend both the Sunday session and the Wednesday lunch. We anticipate funding for partial travel support.

An online application form is available at http://www.amstat.org/meetings/wwjr/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.

For more information contact Keith Crank, Assistant Director for Research and Graduate Education, American Statistical Association (keith@amstat.org).

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2008 Laha Awardees

The IMS is pleased to announce the 2008 Laha Award recipients.

Each awardee will present a paper at the 2008 World Congress/IMS Annual Meeting in Singapore.

Paul Baines
David Croydon
Chongzhi Di
Siegfried Hoermann
Silja Kinnebrock
Chen Quin (Eric) Lam
Qunhua Li
Tyler McCormick
Pál Rakonczai
Daniel Remenik
Deena Schmidt
Cheng Yong Tang
Amanda Turner

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The Numbers Behind the "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"

The Annals of Applied Statistics releasing key article in authenticating tomb.

In 1980 a burial tomb was unearthed in Jerusalem containing ossuaries (limestone coffins) bearing inscriptions indicating that it may be Jesus' crypt. Last year, the Discovery Channel aired a documentary entitled "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" describing the find and the recent research performed to authenticate the tomb. The Discovery Channel presented interpretations of the ossuary inscriptions from a number of perspectives. Among these was a statistical calculation attributed to the statistician Andrey Feuerverger, that "the odds that all six names would appear together in one tomb are 1 in 600, calculated conservatively -— or possibly even as much as one in one million."

Andrey Feuerverger, a Professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto, lays out the full statistical analysis of names on the ossuaries in his article entitled, "Statistical Analysis of an Archeological Find" appearing in the March 2008 issue of the Annals of Applied Statistics. The paper is followed by an exchange with a broad array of statistical experts about the statistical conclusions and their interpretation about the New Testament family. The findings are far more nuanced than the quote attributed originally to Feuerverger in the Discovery Channel presentation. The article will be available March 24, 2008 at http://projecteuclid.org/aoas.

Stephen Fienberg, one of the four editors of the Annals of Applied Statistics, notes, "Feuerverger's paper offers a detailed and thoughtful explication of ossuary inscriptions and biblical era names, and exhibits the nuances inherent in first-rate applied statistical work. One might take issue with some assumptions but not with the care with which he has approached them, nor the any of the actual statistical calculations. The paper is a must-read for anyone interested in what we conclude from the inscriptions in the tomb. But, as the discussants make clear, despite the quality of Feuerverger's work, the controversy over the 'Lost Tomb of Jesus' will certainly continue."

The Annals of Applied Statistics is published quarterly by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The IMS has no relationship with the Discovery Channel.

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2008 Tweedie Award

The Institute of Mathematical Statistics has selected Sourav Chatterjee as the winner of this year's Tweedie New Researcher Award. Dr Chatterjee received his PhD in 2005 at Stanford University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Berkeley University Marina Vannucci, chair of the IMS Travel Awards Committee remarked, “The decision of the Committee was unanimous. Sourav Chatterjee has made striking extensions of classical ideas of Lindeberg and Charles Stein in the spirit of Talagrand’s concentration inequalities, leading to improved inequalities in a broad range of topics from spin glasses and random matrices to estimation of effective dimension of i.i.d. high-dimensional data.” On hearing of the award, Sourav said, “I am honored and humbled. It’s a great opportunity to meet other young statisticians, and to learn about each other’s research.” The IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award will fund Sourav’s travel to present the Tweedie New Researcher Invited Lecture at the IMS New Researchers’ Conference, held this year in Boulder, Colorado, from July 29 to August 2. Click here to return to the web bulletin.

Young Researcher Award: From the Young Researcher Award Committee of the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA)

The IISA is seeking nominations for the two Young Researcher Awards for 2008. The awards will honor one outstanding researcher in theory and one in applications. The recipients will have date of birth on January 1, 1963, or later, and will have significant contribution in high quality research (theory, methodology or applied), and education. In order to be eligible for the award, the candidates must be a member of IISA.

Nominations should contain (a) a cover letter explaining the significance of the research contributions of the candidate, and specifying the area to be considered (theory or applications) (b) the latest CV, and (c) three letters of support. They should be sent to Professor H.N. Nagaraja by March 31, 2008 (hnn@stat.osu.edu). Electronic submissions are strongly recommended. The awards will be presented at the May 22- 25 meeting of IISA at University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA.

Sastry Pantula, pantula@stat.ncsu.edu
Gauri Datta, gauri@stat.uga.edu
Subhasis Ghoshal, ghoshal@stat.ncsu.edu
H.N. Nagaraja, Chair, hnn@stat.osu.edu

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Student Paper Competition: From the Student Paper Competition Committee of the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA)

The IISA will host a student paper competition in the forthcoming conference at University of Connecticut.

Two awards will be given, one in the Theory & Methods category and the other in the Application category. All papers of substantial statistical content are welcome. Papers should be written in English with twelve point fonts and at least 1.5 interline spacing. The length of the paper should not exceed fifteen pages excluding tables and figures. The primary author of an entry paper must be a graduate student at the time of the meeting. An entry should be accompanied by a cover letter and an endorsement by the applicant's major professor. Submission should be made by E-mail as PDF files to Professor Bani K. Mallick by March 31, 2008. The applicant needs to attend the conference for an oral presentation of his/her paper.

Sudipto Banerjee, sudiptob@biostat.umn.edu
Nandini Kannan, nandini.kannan@utsa.edu
Bhramar Mukherjee, bhramar@umich.edu
Bani K. Mallick, Chair, bmallick@stat.tamu.edu

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New joint membership deal for IMS and ISBA

We are pleased to announce that IMS members can join (or renew) with ISBA, the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, at 25% off the regular ISBA dues rate. The same deal applies for ISBA members wanting to join IMS: a 25% reduction. IMS members pay an extra $26 for a year's ISBA membership. ISBA members pay US$71 for a year's IMS membership. For all the IMS dues and subscription prices for individual members, see https://www.imstat.org/secure/orders/IndMember.asp

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Section on Defense and National Security Award

The American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security plans to make an award at the 2008 Joint Statistical Meetings to recognize an outstanding accomplishment or sustained contribution at the intersection of the statistical profession and national defense. Any member of the section is allowed to nominate.

A nomination should include a short description of the basis for the award, contact information for both the nominator and the nominee, and suggested text for the certificate. This recognition does not include a financial award. Electronic nominations are preferred and may be emailed to aparna@lanl.gov. The deadline for nomination is March 21, 2008. Please refer questions to Dr. Aparna V. Huzurbazar (aparna@lanl.gov). The awards committee consists of Aparna V. Huzurbazar (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Myron Katzoff (Centers for Disease Control), and Max Morris (Iowa State University).

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Interdisciplinary Training for Undergraduates in Biological and Mathematical Sciences (UBM)

Synopsis of Program:

The goal of the Undergraduate Biology and Mathematics (UBM) activity is to enhance undergraduate education and training at the intersection of the biological and mathematical sciences and to better prepare undergraduate biology or mathematics students to pursue graduate study and careers in fields that integrate the mathematical and biological sciences.

The core of the activity is jointly-conducted long-term research experiences for interdisciplinary balanced teams of at least two undergraduates from departments in the biological and mathematical sciences.

Projects should focus on research at the intersection of the mathematical and biological sciences. Projects should provide students exposure to contemporary mathematics and biology, addressed with modern research tools and methods. That is, projects must be genuine research experiences rather than rehearsals of research methods. Projects must involve students from both areas in collaborative research experiences and include joint mentorship by faculty in both fields. In addition, it is expected that projects will strengthen the research and education capacity, infrastructure, and culture of the participating institutions. To this end, projects should create models for education in the mathematical and biological sciences and influence the direction of academic programs for a broad range of students. It is expected that project leadership will come from faculty in both the mathematical and biological sciences. UBM is a joint effort of the Education and Human Resources (EHR), Biological Sciences (BIO), and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) Directorates at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Please see http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12207 for details. Due date for proposals: February 21, 2008

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International Congress of Mathematicians 2010

View pdf here.

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NSF Funds for Graduate Student Attendance at Isaac Newton Institute Workshops

The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge, U.K., is hosting a six-month research program on "Statistical Methods for Complex, High-Dimensional Data" from January through June, 2008. The program is attracting some of the leading researchers in statistics, computer science, and computational biology. See www.newton.cam.ac.uk/programmes/SCH/ for more details on the program and the participants.

As part of that program there will be a workshop on "High Dimensional Statistics in Biology" from March 31 through April 4, and a closing workhop on "Future Directions in High-Dimensional Data Analysis" from June 23-27. The National Science Foundation has provided funds to enable ten senior graduate students at U.S. institutions to attend one of those workshops.

Awards will be determined by a committee consisting of Sara van de Geer (chair), David Banks, Peter Bickel, and Ann Lee. The deadline for receiving applications is January 7, 2008. Interested students should send an application packet that contains:

1. A letter of recommendation from their advisor or department chair (that letter should indicate the applicant's gender and minority status).
2. The curriculum vitae of the applicant.
3. If the applicant would like to submit a poster for possible presentation at the workshop, please include a title and abstract.
4. An indication of which workshop the applicant would like to attend (this will not be used for selection).

All applications should be sent electronically to both Sara van de Geer (geer@stat.math.ethz.ch) and David Banks (banks@stat.duke.edu).

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AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture Prize

Nominations are being accepted for the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture prize, to be awarded at the 2008 SIAM Annual Meeting in July 2008.

Anyone in the scientific or engineering community whose work highlights the achievements of women in applied and computational mathematics is eligible for this prize. Nominations must be accompanied by a written justification and a citation of about 100 words that can be read when introducing the speaker. More information about the prize may be found on the SIAM and AWM web sites, respectively at http://www.siam.org/prizes/sponsored/kovalevsky.php and http://www.awm-math.org/kovalevskylectures.html.

If you would like to nominate a candidate for this prize, please send your nomination(s) to me by email, at lega@math.arizona.edu, with copy to the AWM office (awm@awm-math.org). The deadline for this particular solicitation is November 15th, 2007.

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Richard Kenyon Awarded 2007 Loève Prize

David Aldous reports: The 2007 Line and Michel Loève International Prize in Probability is awarded to Richard Kenyon of Brown University, USA. The prize, which carries a monetary award of $30,000, will be presented at a ceremony in Berkeley in October 2007.

Richard Kenyon received his PhD in 1990, advised by Bill Thurston at Princeton. His research has dealt with the interface between statistical mechanics, probability and discrete conformal geometry. His 1997 paper, Local statistics of lattice dimers, studies uniform random dimer configurations (domino tilings) on a graph and shows how to perform many interesting calculations. This has become regarded as the seminal work in the subsequent emergence of a large field studying Gibbs distributions of combinatorial configurations, which has developed in unexpected directions.

For instance:

• His 2000 paper Conformal invariance of domino tiling proves that the height function of a random domino tiling of the two-dimensional lattice has a distribution which, in the scaling limit, is conformally invariant.
• His 2006 paper Dimers and amoebae (with Andrei Okounkov and Scott Sheffield) associates to any periodic bipartite planar graph a curve which can be used to describe the phase space of Gibbs distributions on dimer configurations and categorize them as gaseous, liquid or frozen. Other aspects of this field involve spanning trees, matchings, the Gaussian free field, Harnack curves and various models for random surfaces. The Line and Michel Loève Prize commemorates Michel Loève, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1948 until his untimely death in 1979. The Prize was established by his widow, Line, shortly before her death in 1992. Awarded every two years, it is intended to recognize outstanding contributions by researchers in probability who are under 45 years old.

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IMS Presidential Address: Open Access to Professional Information

This is the IMS Presidential Address given by Jim Pitman at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City, July 30, 2007. See also the IMS Bulletin, Vol 36, Issue 8, pages 12--15 [pdf]

View it in html or as a pdf.

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Nominations Sought for the Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science

The Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health named Scott L. Zeger as the recipient of the 2007 Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science. Dr. Zeger, the Frank Hurley and Catherine Dorrier Professor in Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, delivered a lecture entitled “The Symbiosis of Statistical Science and Biomedicine; Past and Future” on June 1 at Harvard University.

This annual award, supported by colleagues, friends and family, was established to honor Dr. Marvin Zelen’s long and distinguished career as a statistician and his major role in shaping the field of biostatistics.

The award recognizes an individual in government, industry, or academia, who by virtue of his/her outstanding leadership has greatly impacted the theory and practice of statistical science. While individual accomplishments are considered, the most distinguishing criterion is the awardees contribution to the creation of an environment in which statistical science and its applications have flourished. The award recipient will deliver a public lecture on statistical science at the Harvard School of Public Health and will be presented with a citation and an honorarium.

Nominations for next year’s award, to be given in June 2008, should be sent to:

the Marvin Zelen Leadership Award Committee
Department of Biostatistics
Harvard School of Public Health
655 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115

Nominations should include a letter describing the contributions of the candidate, specifically highlighting the criteria for the award, and a curriculum vitae. Supporting letters and materials would be extremely helpful to the committee.

All nominations must be received by December 15, 2007.

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Workshop at IPAM

IPAM is holding a 1-day workshop on October 29. The workshop is intended to aid those interested in writing proposals to understand the initiative better and to help them in finding collaborators.

The NSF is rolling out a major new initiative in late September on "Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation." This will begin as a $50 million dollar program the first year, and will grow over the next 5 years into a $250 million program.

The goal of this workshop is to inform the scientific community about the CDI program, with the aim of eliciting strong proposals involving mathematical scientists. This workshop will be focused on the "knowledge extraction" aspect of the CDI program. For more information about CDI, see http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=108366

There are three types of presentations planned:

• An information session with Q&A with a representative from NSF
• Several panels where each panelist would present a few slides about what they consider to be the interesting and important questions of long-term significance, followed by a discussion with Q&A. Topics envisioned at this point are:
  1. Numerical Methods for Fast Knowledge Extraction
  2. Nonlinear Methods for Dimensional Reduction
  3. Knowledge Extraction from Images and Problems of Visualization
  4. Discrete and Graph-based Techniques for Knowledge Extraction and Analysis of Large Networks
• Selected examples of success stories of applying knowledge extraction techniques from the mathematical sciences to large scale problems

For the program webpage and an online application/registration form, see http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/cdi2007/ .

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2008 Mortimer Spiegelman Award: Call for Nominations

The Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association invites nominations for the 2008 Mortimer Spiegelman Award, honoring a statistician aged 40 or younger who has made outstanding contributions to health statistics, especially public health statistics. The award was established in 1970 and is presented annually at the APHA meeting.

The award serves three purposes:

• To honor the outstanding achievements of both the recipient and Spiegelman
• To encourage further involvement in public health by the finest young statisticians
• To increase awareness of the APHA and the Statistics Section in the academic statistical community

Nominations for the 2008 Award must be submitted by April 1, 2008. To be eligible for the 2008 Spiegelman Award, a candidate must have been born in 1968 or later. Please state in the nominating letter the candidate’s birthday. The nominator should include one or two paragraphs in the nominating letter describing how the nominee’s contributions relate to public health concerns. A maximum of three supporting letters per nomination can be provided. Please send a nominating letter and the candidate’s CV to:

2008 Spiegelman Award Committee
c/o Rebecca Betensky, Chair
Department of Biostatistics
Harvard School of Public Health
655 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Email inquires may be made to betensky@hsph.harvard.edu

Further details about the award including the list of past recipients and more information about the Statistics Section of APHA can be found at http://www.aphastat.org/.

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NSF-AWM Travel Grant Applications Due October 7, 2007

Please note that the next deadline for the NSF-AWM Travel Grant applications is October 7, 2007. The Association for Women in Mathematics travel program supports two types of travel grants for women:

1. Travel Grants in mathematics, for mathematicians attending mathematics conferences.
2. Travel Grants for mathematicians and mathematics education researchers: for mathematicians attending a mathematics education research conference, for mathematics education researchers attending a mathematics conference.

For complete eligibility and application details please visit http:// www.awm-math.org/travelgrants.html. We are pleased to announce that applications are now submitted via an online system.

The Travel Grant Program is sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) and the Division of Research, Evaluation and Communication (REC) of the National Science Foundation.

Please consider taking advantage of this opportunity yourself, if you are eligible, and encourage your eligible colleagues to apply.

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Call for Nominations

Editor-in-Chief, Applied Probability and Operations Research
Deadline for Nominations: October 31, 2007

The Applied Probability Society (APS) of INFORMS, in cooperation with the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), will publish a new journal in the area of applied probability, tentatively titled Applied Probability and Operations Research (APOR). It will be an open access electronic journal intended to serve the interests of APS members and the broader applied probability community.

The APOR Editorial Search Committee is soliciting nominations and applications for the position of editor-in-chief. The inaugural editor-in-chief will have a major role in choosing a name for the new journal, setting its scope and mission, determining the editorial board structure, making initial appointments to the editorial board, and determining the editorial review process. The committee seeks your opinions and comments on all of these matters, and on candidates for inaugural editor-in-chief. Qualifications for the editor-in-chief include:

• a demonstrated interest in a broad range of topics in the field
• a demonstrated record of research in the field
• significant editorial experience
• vision of the role of scholarly publications in the electronic age
• commitment to the workload involved
• ability to effectively and efficiently manage the editorial process

Please submit comments, nominations, and applications by October 31, 2007. When submitting an application, please include a resume and a brief statement concerning vision and plans for the journal. The information may be sent (preferably by e-mail) to the chair of the APOR Editorial Search Committee:

J. Michael Harrison
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
harrison_michael@gsb.stanford.edu

The committee intends to propose a candidate for approval by INFORMS no later than December 31, 2007. All members of INFORMS and of IMS are invited to participate in this process. Members of the search committee are: J. Michael Harrison (chair), Stanford University; Rhonda Righter, U. C. Berkeley; Thomas Kurtz, U. Wisconsin; Martin Reiman, Bell Laboratories; and Terry Harrison, Penn. State U. (committee liaison to the INFORMS Publications Committee).

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IHP Joins with IMS in Publishing Partnership

The IMS recently entered into an agreement with the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP) to print, distribute and market Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré (B) Probability and Statistics (AIHP). IHP will maintain full ownership, copyright and editorial control of the journal. The partnership allows both organizations to achieve greater economies of scale with their journals.

Alice Guionnet, AIHP editor-in-chief, noted, “I am very glad that it has been possible to come to this positive agreement with a trusted non-profit institution such as the IMS. I am confident that this move will be a success and that it will increase the confidence and reputation of our journal in our scientific community.”

Jim Pitman, IMS President, added, “The IMS is very pleased to be able to offer another high quality journal at a reasonable price. Subscribers can expect to see the price for AIHP fall significantly in 2008. In addition, authors will acquire new rights to post copies of their articles on their homepages and in open access digital repositories. We see this as an improvement for all involved with the AIHP: authors, libraries, IHP, and now the IMS.”

In addition to AIHP, the IMS will be offering the following journals to subscribers in 2008: Annals of Applied Probability, Annals of Probability, Annals of Applied Statistics, Annals of Stastistics, Bernoulli, and Statistical Science. Significant discounts will be available to libraries opting to subscribe to all the journals offered by the IMS. Subscriptions to individual journals will remain available.

The IMS is looking to forge future partnerships with other non-profit and scholarly society journals. If you are aware of an organization that would like assistance publishing or would like to market jointly with the IMS, please contact the IMS Executive Director, Elyse Gustafson, at erg@imstat.org.

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Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research

The International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IMS), and the International Mathematical Union (IMU) have formed a Committee of "Quantitative Assessment of Research" that will investigate various aspects of the quantitative assessment of research in mathematics. The Committee will, in particular, look into impact factors and similar ways to measure research output.

The Committee consists of:

• Robert Adler (Haifa, Israel), appointed by IMS
• Peter Taylor (Melbourne, Australia), appointed by ICIAM
• John Ewing (Providence, USA), appointed by IMU

The Committee is expected to create a summary of its findings to be endorsed by the Executive Committees of ICIAM/IMS/IMU and to be published afterwards.

ICIAM, IMS, and IMU have formulated an aspirational charge to help set direction rather than prescribe the final outcome of the committee's work.

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Call for Nominations: 6th Annual Janet L. Norwood Award

The Section on Statistical Genetics and the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) are pleased to request nominations for the Sixth Annual Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences. The award will be conferred on a Wednesday in September to be determined. The award recipient will be invited to deliver a lecture at UAB at the award ceremony, and will receive all expenses to deliver this lecture, a plaque, and a $5,000 prize.

Eligible individuals are women who have completed their terminal degree, have made outstanding contributions to the statistical sciences, and, if selected, are willing to deliver a lecture at the award ceremony. For additional details about the award, please feel invited to visit our website at http://www.soph.uab.edu/ssg/default.aspx?id=25.

To nominate a candidate, send a full curriculum vita accompanied by a letter of not more than two pages in length describing the nature of the candidate's contributions. Contributions may be in the area of development and evaluation of statistical methods, teaching of statistics, application of statistics, or any other activity that can arguably be said to have advanced the field of statistical science. Self-nominations are acceptable.

Please send nominations to:

David B. Allison, Ph.D.
Professor & Head Section on Statistical Genetics Department of
Biostatistics, RPHB 327 University of Alabama at Birmingham
1665 University Boulevard
Birmingham, Alabama 35294-0022
Phone: (205) 975-9169
Fax: (205) 975-2541
Email: dallison@uab.edu

Deadline for receipt of nominations is Mon 7/9/2007. Electronic submissions of nominations are accepted and encouraged. The winner will be announced by Fri 7/13/2007.

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Efron receives the National Medal of Science

Bradley Efron of Stanford University, an IMS Fellow, former IMS president, and current editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics, has been awarded the National Medal of Science by President Bush.

The National Medal of Science was established by the 86th Congress in 1959 as a Presidential Award to be given to individuals "deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to knowledge in the physical, biological, mathematical, or engineering sciences.'' In 1980 Congress expanded this recognition to include the social and behavioral sciences.

See the press release of the Executive Office of the President

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Statistics is a top category in the ArXiv

Statistics, up to now a category within the Math archive, will now be a top-level archive. See http://arxiv.org/archive/stat. The existing math.ST category will be linked to new stat.TH category.

The statistics archive is organized into the following five categories:

• Applications (stat.AP): Biology, Education, Epidemiology, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Medical, Physical Sciences, Quality Control, Social Sciences
• Computation (stat.CO): Algorithms, Simulation, Visualization
• Machine Learning (stat.ML): Classification, Graphical Models, High Dimensional Inference
• Methodology (stat.ME): Design, Surveys, Model Selection, Multiple Testing, Multivariate Methods, Signal and Image Processing, Time Series, Smoothing, Spatial Statistics, Survival Analysis, Nonparametric and Semiparametric Methods
• Theory (stat.TH, linked to math.ST): Asymptotics, Bayesian Inference, Decision Theory, Estimation, Foundations, Inference, Testing

For more information, see http://arxiv.org/new/stat_announce.html

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IMS Fellows Elected to Academies

Three IMS Fellows have been recently elected to academies. Stephen Fienberg (Carnegie Mellon University) has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Richard Durrett (Cornell University) and Sir John Kingman (past director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge) have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

See the press release at the National Academies.

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Varadhan Receives The Abel Prize

The day it was announced that Varadhan would receive the 2007 Abel Prize, the editors of the IMS Bulletin invited me to write a profile “bio-sketch”. Having, as a consequence of writing two biographical pieces about him in the past, become his official biographer, I suppose they assumed that it would be easy for me to write another. Given the tight deadline, I accepted their invitation on the condition that they allow me to borrow extensively from the article I wrote for the Notices of the AMS at the time when Varadhan ran for the presidency of that august society, an article to which, with all due modesty, I attribute the sound trouncing that he received in the subsequent election. They agreed and, as anyone familiar with it will recognize, I have lifted most of what follows from my Notices article.

Varadhan, whom everyone else calls Raghu, came to America from his native India in the fall of 1963. Arriving at Kennedy Airport (or was it still Idlewild?), he proceeded to Manhattan by bus, past twenty miles of uninterrupted cemeteries. For a young Hindu from Madras accustomed to tidier procedures for disposing of the dead, this introduction to his future home must have been less than reassuring: was he entering some sort of necropolis? His destination in Manhattan was that famous institution, The Courant Institute of Mathematical Science, where, at the behest of Monroe Donsker, he had been given a postdoctoral fellowship. At the time, CIMS had not yet moved out of the hat factories to which NYU had originally consigned Richard Courant’s reincarnation of Gottingen. Thus, when I, a humble graduate student from the opulent Rockefeller Institute, first met Varadhan, he was sequestered in one of the many dingy, windowless offices out of which flowed a remarkably large fraction of the postwar mathematics of which America (or at least the American mathematical community) is justly proud.

Varadhan had completed his PhD at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. As much as any other institution, ISI is responsible for the (apparently incorrect) rumor that the Indian term for statistician is “Rao.” Thus, it was a surprise to no one that Varadhan came equipped with a superb grounding in statistics (a subject about which few other probabilists know anything at all). But CIMS was hoping for more. Varadhan’s own arrival at CIMS had been preceded by that of V.S. Varadarajan, another renowned graduate of ISI, whose extraordinary mathematical erudition was already evident in the much-coveted set of notes which he produced during his sojourn there. Within a year or so, Varadhan demonstrated that he certainly could, and probably would, fulfill or exceed any of the hopes that Donsker and the rest of CIMS might have for him. Although, because most of the results had been found slightly earlier by no less a figure than K. Ito, he never published the research which he did during his first year at CIMS, within a few months of his arrival, Varadhan’s promise was never again in doubt. Rather than pine over his misfortune, Varadhan dropped the project on which he had spent a year and took up, mastered, and brought to fruition an idea of Donsker’s which made its first appearance in the beautiful thesis of Donsker’s student M. Schilder. The general idea in Schilder’s thesis was that one should attempt Laplace-type methods to develop asymptotics for the evaluation of Wiener integrals. Although, thinking in terms of Feynman integral representations for solutions to Schrodinger’s equation, physicists had made somewhat casual reference to related ideas in order to justify Ehrenfest’s “theorem” (the one which asserts that quantum mechanics becomes classical mechanics as Planck’s constant goes to 0), Schilder seems to have been the first mathematician to come to grips with the challenge presented by carrying out Laplace asymptotics in an infinite dimensional setting. However, Schilder’s treatment was somewhat primitive and its applicability was severely limited. In particular, only after Varadhan took up the problem did it become clear that Schilder had been studying a very special example of what statisticians call the theory of large deviations.

The study of large deviations goes back to the work of Khinchine and Cramer, but the term ’theory’ is not an accurate description of what they had produced. In fact, if there is, even now, something which deserves the name, the theory of large deviations was born in Varadhan’s famous 1966 article on the subject, in the CIMS journal Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics (29, no. 3). It was in that article that he clarified the analogy between large deviations and the theory of weak convergence of measures, an analogy on which he based his formulation of the large deviation principle in terms of an upper bound for closed sets and a lower bound for open sets. Of course, a formulation does not a theory make. But Varadhan provided the theory as well. Namely, as summarized to me by a Japanese friend, the theory of large deviations consists of two steps: the first one requires you to prove either the upper or lower bound yourself, the second step is to get on the telephone and ask Varadhan how to prove the other bound.

As anyone who has followed his career will confirm, large deviations has been a recurring theme in Varadhan’s mathematics. For one thing, Varadhan has had an uncanny ability to understand that large deviations are manifest in all sorts of situations where nobody else even suspected their presence. To me, the most spectacular example of his special insight lies in his realization that M. Kac’s old formula for the first eigenvalue of a Schrodinger operator can be interpreted in terms of the large deviations. Like those in Schilder’s thesis, the large deviations here involve Wiener measure. However, whereas Schilder dealt with large deviations of Brownian paths over a very short interval, the explanation for Kac’s formula must be sought in the large deviations of Brownian paths from ergodic behavior over very long intervals. So far as I know (and I was one of his students), Kac himself, much less anyone else, had never guessed that such an interpretation might exist. Furthermore, I suspect that not even Varadhan anticipated the wealth of results to which systematic exploitation of his insight has led over the last 20 years. His insight not only underlies the profound applications which appear in his own famous work with Donsker, but also accounts for the subsequent (possibly over-abundant) effusion of articles by others (including myself) on the topic.

Toward the end of the period when Varadhan was polishing off the program initiated in Schilder’s thesis, he and I began the discussions which eventually led to our formulation of diffusion theory in terms of what we called the martingale problem. Those discussions took place more than 40 years ago, but they remain in my mind as the single experience which makes me most grateful to have entered mathematics. Of course, the pleasure of participating in what turned out to be a successful enterprise was great. But I think that I am being honest when I assert that the ultimate success of our collaboration was only part of the pleasure which I derived from it. The other part was my getting to know Varadhan. I was a young man who had been afforded every advantage: I had educated, prosperous parents who paid my passage through the best schools in America. Here was a man my own age whose parents, though superbly educated, were far from prosperous. He had won his passage by out-performing all but a handful of the literally millions of Indians his age. Perhaps more impressive to me was that, unlike most of the people I knew who had succeeded in the face of adversity, Varadhan had emerged unscathed. Unlike the majority of gifted people whom I had encountered, Varadhan never used his gifts as a weapon against his less gifted colleagues. He was then, and remains, a true gentleman.

- Daniel W. Stroock

Please see the Abel Prize Web site.

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Request for Proposals for the 2008 NSF-CBMS Regional Research Conferences in the Mathematical Sciences

Deadline: April 20, 2007

To stimulate interest and activity in mathematical research, the National Science Foundation intends to support up to seven NSF-CBMS Regional Research Conferences in 2008. A panel chosen by the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences will make the selections from among the submitted proposals. In the thirty-eight year history of this NSF-CBMS Regional Research Conference Series, a total of 306 such conferences have been held.

Each five day conference features a distinguished lecturer who delivers ten lectures on a topic of important current research in one sharply focused area of the mathematical sciences. The lecturer subsequently prepares an expository monograph based upon these lectures, which is normally published as a part of a regional conference series. Depending upon the conference topic, the monograph is published by the American Mathematical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, or jointly by the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Support is provided for about 30 participants at each conference and the conference organizer invites both established researchers and interested newcomers, including postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, to attend.

http://www.cbmsweb.org/NSF/2008_call.htm

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From the IMS President: Jim Pitman

Invitation to Form an IMS Group

This is an invitation from IMS to the organizers of various groups of people with interests related to probability and statistics, to register their group as an IMS Group. The IMS Groups Program is intended to promote professional communication amongst groups of scholars with common interests, which might be region-specific, subject-specific, or both, or otherwise defined.

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From the IMS President: Jim Pitman

Recognizing that the interests of IMS members now span an enormous range from pure mathematical theory to collaborations with scientists in numerous fields, IMS is launching a new journal, The Annals of Applied Statistics, aimed at papers in the applied half of this range. Published quarterly in both print and electronic form, our goal is to provide a timely and unified forum for all areas of applied statistics. The first Editor-in-Chief is Brad Efron, supported by Stephen Fienberg, Editor for social science, government, sample surveys, and economics, by Michael Newton, Editor for biology, medicine, and genetics, by Michael Stein, Editor for physical science, computation, engineering, and the environment, and by a distinguished team of more than 30 associate editors. Please support this journal by submitting your best applied work there.

Conferences, journals, and the IMS Bulletin and website are different ways that the IMS serves its purpose “to foster the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability”. The IMS manages the human and technical infrastructure to provide these services. It is clear that in future most professional communication will occur in the electronic realm, and that the IMS must adapt its infrastructure to respond. The IMS already supports four electronic-only journals in probability, but this development has been slower in statistics. At the Rio meeting in July, IMS council supported the creation of two new electronic journals in statistics: a research journal to be called the Electronic Journal of Statistics, and a survey journal, Statistics Surveys. What is most needed now for success of these journals is authors willing to submit high quality articles to these electronic-only outlets. And wherever you submit your articles, to increase their visibility and impact, please be sure to place a copy on ArXiv, preferably at the time of submission. As a benefit of membership, IMS provides assistance posting articles to ArXiv. If you need assistance, please login to your member account at www.imstat.org and click on the ArXiv links.

In another action at the Rio meeting, IMS council created categories of Departmental and Contributing Membership for organizations that wish to be involved with IMS. The intention is for IMS to support electronic outlets for the aggregation and management of professional information provided by these organizational members. IMS already does this on its web site for job advertisements, with the service paid for by the advertiser, and free to the user. I have been working with IMS on development of software for the automated management and display of other categories of professional information through web services. I hope to see these services supported by the same business model, and if successful these services should generate further advertising revenue. These categories of professional information include biographies and bibliographies (for individuals or institutions), webliographies (annotated links to web resources), abstracts, technical reports, program descriptions, data, software, and potentially any kind of professional information which benefits from organization and aggregation. If you are interested in helping IMS with this development, e.g. by acting as moderator or editor for some novel information forum, or by contributing expertise in databases or web applications such as wikis, please let me know. Appreciating that such developments require a commitment of human resources, IMS Council has approved the creation of a new position on the executive, the Information Technology Secretary, charged with arranging and coordinating all activities concerned with information management for the Institute. If you have suggestions of someone (including yourself) who might be an appropriate choice for this position, please contact me.

To conclude, let me emphasize that the success of IMS as an organization rests on the continuing commitment of members to IMS Committees and other administrative roles. Over the next month or so I will be making new appointments to IMS committees, and if you are willing to serve in some capacity I will be glad to hear from you. One new committee of special importance is the Membership Committee. Here I seek energetic individuals with ideas about what services IMS should provide to attract continued membership from individuals and institutions, and how best to advertise those services. I look forward to hearing your suggestions.

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IMS Lecture Notes – Monograph Series Warehouse Sale Extended

Select volumes are on sale for $10 each including shipping.

Order online or use this form.

Note: Some volumes may have slight discoloration to the cover, but all contents are intact.

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