To start the year’s SMRI talks we are very fortunate to have Nancy Reid OC FRS FRSC, who is visiting SMRI through the International Visitor Program. She has kindly agreed to repeat the general-audience colloquium talk which she recently delivered as the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture at the 2020 AMS/MAA Joint Mathematics Meetings in Denver. I urge all School members who are in Sydney to take this opportunity to hear from one of the world’s leading theoretical statisticians - Anthony -------------------------------------------- Title: In Praise of Small Data: Statistical and Data Science Speaker: Nancy Reid (University of Toronto) Date and Time: Thursday 30th January 2020, 1605-1655 Location: Quad Oriental Room S204 Abstract: Statistical science has a 200-year history of advances in theory and application. Data science is a relatively newly defined area of enquiry developing from the explosion in the ubiquitous collection of data. The interplay between these fields, and their interactions with science, are a topic of lively discussion among statisticians. This talk will overview some of the current research in statistical science that is motivated by new developments in data science. Bio: Nancy Reid is University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory and Applications at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include statistical theory, likelihood inference, design of studies, and statistical science in public policy. She has held many professional leadership roles in statistical science, in Canada and abroad. Her main research contributions have been to the field of theoretical statistics. The goal is to use information from noisy data as efficiently and elegantly as possible, and to elucidate general principles for doing so, in order to provide structures for developing new statistical methods in new areas of application. Professor Reid is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Canada, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2014 she was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The venue for the talk is the Oriental Room on the ground floor of the main quadrangle, directly off the Ground Floor ’Left Lobby’ (the front entrance closest to Fisher library). If you can, please join us at SMRI before the talk for the regular weekly afternoon tea at 3pm.