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StatNews [Winter 2001]: In This Issue --
Xuming He, Director Susanne Aref, Manager As the new director of the Illinois Statistics Office (ISO), I have the pleasure to witness continued success of ISO in fulfilling its mission to provide statistical support to a wide variety of clients, as well as to give our students an excellent opportunity to broaden and enrich their experience with statistics. Our clients included faculty, graduate students, and other researchers
and scientists associated with this and other universities, such as Berkeley
and University of Chicago, corporations, such as Eli Lilly and CIMRO, government
agencies, and many individuals. We helped people working in many different
areas ranging from animal sciences, aviation, biology, crop sciences to
civil engineering, entomology, finance, and psychology. Some of the consulting
projects we worked on this past year are:
We are fortunate to have several excellent student consultants this year. Felicia Trachtenberg, Hanga Galfalvy and Li Liu worked for ISO until they were ready to finish their Ph.D this summer. Masha Kocherginsky and Ringo Ho continued this fall, joined by our new student consultants Mi-Ok Kim and Nan Lin. Our faculty consultants include Professors Barbara Bailey, Peter Imrey, and Douglas Simpson with expertise in almost every area of modern statistics. Dr. Susanne Aref, the ISO Manager, deserves special credit for her dedication and her contributions that grow together with Illinois Statistics Office. I am happy to add that ISO has moved into a larger space to accommodate the growth in activity. We are ready to help anyone with statistical consulting needs. To learn more about our services, please visit our website at http://www.stat.uiuc.edu/~iso or contact us directly at (217) 333-5703.
Professor Walter Philipp Retires Professor Walter Philipp retired as of May 20, 2000 with an Emeritus status. He has been busier than ever. His groundbreaking paper entitled "Bell's Theorem and the Problem of Decidability between the Einstein-Podolsky Rosen Theory and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" joint with Professor Karl Hess of the Beckman Institute, was accepted for publication in Anzeiger der _ sterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. The Department wishes him a Happy Retirement.
Douglas G. Simpson I take this opportunity to congratulate Adam Martinsek on a highly successful term as chair. During the past five years enrollment in our courses has increased dramatically, new interdisciplinary connections have been established, graduates have gone on to outstanding positions in academics, industry and government, and faculty careers have advanced. As I begin my term it is gratifying also to observe the accomplishments and honors of our faculty. As of January 2001, John Marden will be editor of the Annals of Statistics. Bill Stout is president-elect of the Psychometric Society. Stanley Wasserman is president-elect of the Classification Society of North America. Peter Imrey is chair-elect of the Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association. I might also mention that I was recently elected as a Fellow of the ASA. I congratulate my colleagues for their honors and thank them for their service to the profession. This is a period of challenges and opportunities for the department. Campus initiatives in biotechnology and information technology reflect an environment in which data and information are more important than ever. Statistical research and teaching ought to be at the forefront of these efforts. New faculty hiring will enhance our ability to build in these areas and in current areas of departmental strength such as educational and psychological measurement. To this end, we are searching for two faculty positions this year and plan for additional hiring in the future. I encourage our faculty, staff, students and alumni to be active members of the planning and recruiting process, and I welcome input from all of you.
Adam T. Martinsek I would like to thank the faculty, students, staff and alumni of the department, along with the wider statistics community and the campus community, for their support during the past five years. Through our joint efforts the department has made significant progress on many fronts. I would also like to express my thanks to Doug Simpson for his willingness to take over the chairmanship. Doug is a perfect choice for the job, and I look forward to continued and indeed accelerated progress under his leadership.
Dr. Hengjian Cui, Department of Mathematics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China, is visiting the department as a visiting scholar from August 2000 to August 2001. Dr. Cui is here as Professor Xuming He's guest. Dr. Ellen Fireman, visiting lecturer, is teaching in the 2000-01 academic year. Dr. Wing K. Fung, associate dean, Faculty of Social Sciences and professor, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, The University of Hong Kong, is conducting research as Professor Xuming He's guest. Dr. Daniel Gervini, Departmento de Matematica, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, will continue teaching in the 2000-01 academic year. He started teaching in the department in August 1999.
The department welcomes four new graduate students this year: Yi Jing, Haiying Liu, Rebecca Tillman, and Xueli Xu.
Statistics Measurement Laboratory Director: William Stout Having finished her thesis and been granted a Ph. D. in statistics, former lab member Amy Froelich accepted a position as assistant professor of statistics at Iowa State that began in fall 2000. We wish her well. Professor Ivo Molenaar of the University of Groningen spent November to February of the 1999-2000 academic year here on a Fulbright working with William Stout and others on issues of latent dimensionality detection. The result is a couple of papers in progress and much better versions of DETECT (contribution of this side of the Atlantic, namely our Lab) and MSP (the Dutch side of the Atlantic; Molenaar a major architect). Ivo's visit was both a professional success and lots of fun besides. Closely related, Ivo and Bill have been invited to be co-discussants
in a special issue in the Applied Psychological Measurement journal
on Nonparametric Item Response Theory (NIRT), drawing on participants from
both sides of the Atlantic. Interestingly, all of the U.S. contributors
are former members of the Lab: Brian Habing, University of South Carolina;
Jeff Douglas and Dan Bolt, University of Wisconsin; and Brian Junker, Carnegie
Mellon University. This is indicative of the central contribution of current
and former members of the lab to this evolving and important topic. It
is also indicative of the cooperative network that exists between current
and former members of the Lab.
We are pleased that William Stout is next year's President-elect of the Psychometric Society: rumor has it that he is already thinking about his presidential address and about ways to bring the statistics and the psychometric community closer together. Sarah Hartz , current lab member shared this year's College of Education scholarship award for outstanding Ph. D. student in measurement and psychology, joining Dan Bolt and Amy Froelich, former Lab members who were past award winners. We welcome new Department of Statistics Ph. D student Haiying Liu to the Lab, a transfer from Psychology (evening out things in that Louis Roussos years ago transferred from Statistics to Psychology). Haiying is enjoying herself and is playing an important role in our current Law School Admission Council grant to assist in LSAC's development of a computerized LSAT (Law School Admissions Test). We also welcome Ph. D. student Juan Moran to the Lab, a transfer from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, who is seeking his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology. Recently we finished an Educational Testing Service funded study examining issues of test equity from the perspective of the new Roussos-Stout paradigm for studying and finding test bias. We believe this is an important piece of work, one of the first in-depth applications of our new test bias viewpoint. It promises to be an exciting year intellectually. For example, we have
a new contract with LSAC to further develop and customize our statistical
tools for use with their computerized development of their LSAT. Moreover,
both Sarah Hartz and Bill Stout have been invited to give addresses at
the Summer 2001 International Psychometric Society meeting in Japan. Jeff
Douglas and Sarah Hartz are combining their interests in applications of
psychometrics to health sciences and medicine and are developing a joint
research project. Work continues on our non-parametric Item Response Theory
latent dimensionality assessment methods. We are finding Markov Chain Monte
Carlo methods very useful for various computationally intensive and parameter
rich settings.
Milestones: Robert E. Bohrer, 1939-1993 Robert E. Bohrer, Professor of Statistics at the University of Illinois, died November 26, 1993 at home in Champaign, at the age of 54, of complications of diabetes. Bob was a Fellow of ASA and a member of IMS. As statistician, colleague and friend, his remarkable presence will be long remembered. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1939, Bob graduated in Mathematics from the South Dakota School of Mines, and in 1965 completed his doctorate under Wassily Hoeffding at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1964-68 he served as Statistician, and from 1966-68 as Head, Statistical Theory Group, at the Research Triangle Institute. During that period he also maintained an adjunct appointment in Statistics at North Carolina. In 1968 he returned fully to academia at the University of Illinois, where he spent the remainder of his career in the Mathematics Department and, with its formation in 1985, the Department of Statistics. He interrupted his activities in the Prairie State for two sabbaticals and five summers at Berkeley, and for summer and visiting appointments at the College of Wales (Aberystwyth), University of Kent (Canterbury), and Imperial College (London). Bob's statistical contributions spanned a variety of areas, among them sequential designs, Scheffe confidence bounds, probabilistic computations in several dimensions, multiple decision rules, Stein and related estimation problems, and random number generation. He was also a valued collaborator in biological, psychological, and econometric research, and as an occasional consultant to industry. His work was at once mathematically profound, technically adroit, scientifically perceptive, and whimsical. To demonstrate the failure of a then widely-used pseudo-random number generator, Bob had the output musically transcribed and played on the flute. The tape recording, played during an invited presentation, revealed obvious audible patterns. His over fifty publications were predominantly statistical, and were distributed among the most rigorous journals of mathematical statistics and biostatistics. By the mid-1970's, as a young Associate Professor, Bob was blind from diabetes. In compensation, he developed prodigious skills of memory which enabled him to continue to excel in both his teaching and research. Students and colleagues were at times startled by his ability to respond to questions during his lectures by pointing accurately to equations written on previous blackboards some time earlier.
Robert Bohrer Student Workshop The sixth annual Robert Bohrer Memorial Student Workshop was held on April 15, 2000 at Levis Faculty Center, University of Illinois. Professor David Bartholomew, formerly Professor of Statistics and Pro-Director of the London School of Economics and President of the Royal Statistical Society, was the keynote speaker and spoke on "Statistics Matters." More than 40 faculty and students attended the workshop. The department would like to thank everyone who participated in the workshop and especially those students who submitted papers. The following students were awarded prizes: Li Liu, (Department of Statistics), winner of the Horace Norton prize, presented a paper titled, "Building a Nonparametric Model After Dimension Reduction." Hanga Galfalvy, (Department of Statistics), presented a paper titled, "Marginal and Conditional Models for Mixed Effect Models for Censored Data." Willeim Kuurman, (Department of Animal Sciences), presented a paper titled, "A Model for Failure of a Chicken Embryo to Survive Incubation." The next Robert Bohrer Student Workshop is being planned for April 14, 2001 at Levis Faculty Center. Joint Illinois-Purdue Colloquium Joint Illinois-Purdue Colloquia were held on October 7, 1999 at Purdue and on February 25, 2000 at the University of Illinois. Professor Daniel Gervini, (Department of Statistics at UIUC and Unversidad de Buenos Aires), gave a talk at Purdue on "A Robust and Fully Efficient Regression Estimator," and Professor Arup Bose, (Indian Statistical Institute and Purdue University) spoke at UIUC on "Generalized Bootstrap Technique and its accuracy."
Off-Campus Under the direction of Professor Barbara Bailey, the Department once again enjoyed excellent seminar speakers throughout the year. Those presenting from outside the University of Illinois included: Professor David Bartholomew, formerly professor of statistics and pro-director of the London School of Economics and president of the Royal Statistical Society, "The Benefits of a General Approach to Latent Variable Analysis." Professor Arup Bose, Indian Statistical Institute and Purdue University, "Generalized Bootstrap Technique and its Accuracy." Professor Tony Cai, Department of Statistics, Purdue University, "Analysis of Spectral Data via Wavelets and A Functional Linear Model." Dr. Viswanath Devanarayan, Eli Lilly & Company, "Resampling-Like Methods for Correcting Measurement Error Bias in Generalized Linear Models." Professor Daniel Gervini, Universidad de Buenos Aires, "A Robust and Fully Efficient Regression Estimator." Professor Jana Jurecková, Charles University, Prague, "A Class of Tests based on the Tail Index." Professor Abram Kagan, Mathematics Department, University of Maryland, "A New Statistical Structure: the Algebra of UMVUE's From Categorical Data." Dr. Lauren McIntyre, Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, "Detection and Location of a Single Binary Trait Locus in Experimental Populations." Professor Ivan Mizera, Department of Probability and Statistics, Comenius University, Bratislava, "Continuity of Halfspace Depth Contours and Maximum Depth Estimators: Diagnostics of Depth-related Methods," and "Plastic Splines." Professor Ivo W. Molenaar, Statistics and Measurement, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, "The Random and the Regular." Dr. Bruce Richardson, VP Analytic Insights Development at IRI, "Product Choice Models in Consumer Package Goods." Professor Elvezio Ronchetti, Department of Econometrics, University of Geneva, Switzerland, "Robustness Aspects of Model Selection." Professor Francoise Seillier-Moiseiwitsch, Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Statistical Methods for HIV Genomics." Professor Leonard Smith, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, "Dimensions, Dynamics & Determinism Issues in 2-D and 107-D." Professor Christopher Wikle, Department of Statistics, University of Missouri-Columbia, "Hierarchical Bayesian Models in Atmospheric Science," at the special seminar sponsored by the Statistics & Atmospheric Sciences departments. Professor Jimmy Ye, Baruch College, City University of New York, "On Specifications Problems in Equity Valuation Models."
Colloquia Speakers, 1999-2000 On-Campus The following speakers from the University of Illinois spoke in colloquia during 1999-2000. Professor Barbara Bailey, Department of Statistics, "A Short Short-Course in Data Mining." Professor George Gertner, Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, "Error Budgets for Natural Resource Monitoring and Projections Systems." Professor Tim Futing Liao, Department of Sociology, "Dealing with Missing Data in Historical Documents: A Latent Class Analysis for Partially Missing Patterns." Dr. Lei Liu, Director of Bioinformatics, Biotechnology Center, "Bioinformatics--Mathematical Structure of Biological Data." Professor Walter Philipp, Department of Statistics, "Pair Correlations and U-Statistics for Independent and Weakly Dependent Random Variables." Professor Stephen Portnoy, Department of Statistics, "Some Pathological Regression Asymptotics Under Stable Conditions." Professor Carolyn White, Department of Sociology, "Census 2000." Professor Zhijie Xiao, Department of Economics, "A Nonparametric Prewhitened Covariance Estimator."
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