Statistical Society NSW AGM & Lancaster Lecture: Thomas Lumley

The Annual General Meeting of the NSW Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia 
will be held on Tuesday 10th March at UTS. It will be followed by the annual 
Lancaster lecture which is to be delivered this year by Professor Thomas Lumley from 
the University of Auckland. All are welcome at the lecture. Some refreshments will be 
provided prior to the AGM. Other details appear below.

Cheers,

Michael

==================

Venue: CB11.04.401, University of Technology Sydney, Building 11 (FEIT Building) 
       81-115 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007

Schedule:
6:00 - 6:30pm: Refreshments 
6:30 - 7:00pm: AGM
7:00 - 8:00pm: Lancaster Lecture
8:15pm onwards: Dinner (TBC)

Data Science: Will Computer Science and Informatics Eat Our Lunch?

Mainstream statistics ignored computing for many years, so that students were taught to 
handle infinite N, but not N of a million. Practical estimation of conditional 
probabilities and conditional distributions in large data sets was often left to 
computer science and informatics. Although statistics started behind, we are 
catching up: many individual statisticians and some statistics departments are taking 
computing seriously.  More importantly, applied statistics has a long tradition of 
understanding how to formulate questions: large-scale empirical data can tell you 
a lot of things, but not what your question is. Big Data are not only Big but Complex, 
Messy, Badly Sampled, and Creepy. These are problems that statistics has thought about 
for some time, so we have the opportunity to take all the shiny computing technology 
that other people have developed and use it to re-establish statistics at the centre of 
data science.  

Biography of Professor Thomas Lumley

Thomas Lumley attended Monash University (B.Sc.(Hons) in Pure Mathematics),
the University of Oxford (M.Sc. in Applied Statistics) and the University
of Washington, Seattle (PhD in Biostatistics). He spent twelve years on the
faculty of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington,
and then moved to Auckland in 2010. He is still an Affiliate Professor at
the University of Washington. His research interests include semiparametric
models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics,
and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with
-- currently, the design and analysis of a DNA resequencing study.