Latest news

Registration for the 2014 Workshop on Algorithms for Modern Massive Data Sets (MMDS 2014) is now available.

Congratulations to Jonathan who was awarded the Citadel Student Fellowship for 2014-15!  Citadel generously supports an annual graduate student fellowship. This competitive fellowship provides a year of support to an exceptional PhD graduate student within the department.

Congratulations to two of our first-year Statistics PhD students, Yannik Pitcan and Andre Waschka, who won National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships!

Prof. Bin Yu and five other Berkeley faculty--Josh Bloom (Astronomy), Michael Franklin (EECS), Joseph Hellerstein (EECS), AnnaLee Saxenian (I School), and Ion Stoica (EECS)--named among "21 Thought-Leader Professors in Data Science".

Assistant professor Ben Recht and graduate student Ashia Wilson are featured on the Berkeley Research Highlights web page.  Read more about the work and life of Ben Recht – a winner of the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers here.

Continuing the series of three highly successful MOOCS she taught last year, Prof. Ani Adhikari is teaching Statistics 2.1X again right now, to an audience of over 28,000 students. Last year's 2.1X-2.3X series had near-record completion rates of 15%, 17%, and 9%, compared to typical completion rates of 4-5%.

Professor Brillinger will receive an honorary D.Sc. from the University of Toronto in June, in recognition "of his pioneering contributions to the fields of stochastic analysis and time series analysis." This is Prof. Brillinger's fourth honorary doctorate.

Assistant Professor Ben Recht, who holds a joint appointment in the departments of EECS and Statistics, is one of 102 recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Terry Speed, will receive the 2013 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in recognition of his life’s work using mathematics and statistics to solve real world issues.

Professor in the Department of Statistics, Nicholas Jewell, has won the Berkeley Academic Senates Faculty Service Award.  The award is given to "honor a member of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate who has given outstanding and dedicated service to the Berkeley campus".  The Academic Senate provided the following statement to motivate the choice of Prof. Jewell:

Professor in the Department of Statistics, Deborah Nolan, has been awarded the William R. Kenan, Jr. Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. The award is given to individuals "who have set standards for exceptional scholarship and distinguished teaching".   Prof.

Dear Alums,

Statistics Ph.D. student Jeffrey Regier has been awarded the 2013 Google US/Canada Fellowship in Machine Learning. Only 15 of these highly competitive fellowships were given out this year, and only one in machine learning. Please congratulate Jeff on receipt of this prestigious award.

There's more information in this Google Research blog post:

The Statistics commencement ceremony will take place at 2pm in Wheeler Auditorium.

The commencement speaker is John P.A Ioannidis from Stanford University.

Professor Terry Speed has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Here is a profile of Terry Speed from the Royal Society.

Professor Bin Yu has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics section.

Congratulations, Bin!

See also the complete list of new members.

Peter Bickel will give the COPSS Fisher lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Montreal on August 7th, at 4pm.

The title of his talk is "From Fisher to "Big Data": continuities and discontinuities".

Here is a partial program for JSM.

Congratulations to Adam Bloniarz, Geno Guerra, Jeff Regier and Ashia Wilson!

Ashia Wilson and Geno Guerra were awarded NSF fellowships, Jeff Regier was awarded the Citadel Fellowship for 2013-14 and Adam Bloniarz was awarded a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship from the ASEE.