The College of Science extends a warm and hearty welcome to the 200 participants of the 2016 International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Conference August 18-21. The conference kicked off with a lively and convivial wine and cheese reception at the Hilton Garden Inn Thursday evening.

Earlier in the day, graduate students from OSU and other universities participated in four short pre-conference short courses taught by visiting statisticians from Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of California at Los Angeles and SAS Institute.

With a theme of “Statistical and Data Sciences: A Key to Healthy People, Planet and Prosperity,” the conference offers attendees more than 50 panel discussions on statistical innovation and applications in areas, ranging from big data to genomics, climate science, public health and biomedical science. Featuring talks by many award-winning and distinguished statisticians from varied professions, the conference is a unique, landmark event in the field of statistical sciences in Oregon.

Statistics faculty and researchers from the College of Science and across OSU participated at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Chicago this week. Many presented invited talks at JSM 2016, one of the largest statistical events in the world with over 6,000 attendees from 52 countries.

Dean Sastry Pantula spoke on three panels on diversity and mentoring andnhe served as a mentor to several students at the JSM Diversity Workshop and Mentoring Program this year. Dean Pantula is an impassioned advocate for increasing minority representation in statistical education and the sciences, and has been a dedicated mentor to young statisticians for the past 30 years.

Pantula was honored for his outstanding and extensive service to the statistics profession with the 2016 Paul Minton Service Award from the Southern Regional Council On Statistics (SRCOS) at the JSM.

The 2016 International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Conference "Statistical and Data Sciences: A Key to Healthy People, Planet and Prosperity" will be hosted by the Department of Statistics at Oregon State University in the state-of-the art Learning Innovation Center August 18-21. The conference has attracted 200 statisticians worldwide, including from Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Egypt, across academia, industry, government and research institutes who will discuss the latest statistical developments and challenges.

Sessions at the conference range from statistical innovation and applications in big data, biomedical sciences, network analysis, high dimensional data, genomics, climate sciences, public health and ecology to probability theory and advances in bayesian techniques, biostatistics and spatial statistics. Panels on career development, women is statistics, and collaboration across organizations offer fresh perspective on such topics of interest. The conference also includes a wine and cheese networking reception, banquet dinner featuring Indian food, and an award ceremony.

Debashis Mondal, assistant professor of statistics at OSU, is the organizer and program committee chair of the conference. This past year, several committeesworked collaboratively to plan and execute IISA 2016, including an executive, program, scientific advisory and local organizing committees.

The conference will feature presentations by internationally acclaimed statisticians, such as plenary addresses by Kanti Mardia, an award winning statistician from the University of Leeds and Oxford University, and Xiao-Li Meng, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science and statistics professor at Harvard University.

Keynote talks will be delivered by Katherine Ensor,Vice-President of the American Statistical Association and chair of the Department of Statistics, Debashis Ghosh, chair of the Biostatistics Department at University of Colorado, Kannan Natarajan, senior vice president and global head of biometrics and data management at Novartis Pharmaceuticals, and Ajit Tamhane, senior associate dean and professor at Northwestern University.

In addition to the technical talks, the conference will offer sessions on early career development; collaborations across academic, industry and government organizations; and funding opportunities in industry and federal agencies through three panel discussions. Dean Pantula will moderate a panel on career development.

Graduate students from Oregon State and beyond will participate in four pre-conference short courses on applied and statistical software use offered by visiting statisticians from Columbia University, University of California at Los Angeles, Northwestern University and SAS Institute. Students were able to register for the conference and attend the courses at no cost thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The conference’s focus on data sciences and their role in human health and industry is very timely given the deluge of data in our everyday lives. Everything from health records to environmental monitoring, agriculture and online behavior are being measured and captured in clicks, “likes,” tweets and purchases. With this proliferation of data, the ability to analyze large data sets—big data—has caused incredible demand for people trained in the statistical and data sciences.

“Data science is a key area of growth in the College of Science because it is highly relevant, we have an obligation, we have key strengths and there is tremendous opportunity,” said Sastry G. Pantula, dean of the College of Science at OSU.

“I am thrilled that OSU is the place to convene leading statisticians from across academia, industry and government. We will have some of the brightest minds in the field of data science on our campus. It is an incredible honor and opportunity for our university and our community.”

IISA seeks to promote education, research and application of statistics and probability throughout the world with a special emphasis on the Indian subcontinent.

“The conference will provide platform for statisticians to collaborate across diverse areas of interest, foster partnership across various statistical organizations to move forward the evolving field of statistics and nurture the need of young statisticians” said Amarjot Kaur, IISA President and Executive Director of Biostatistics at Merck.

“Many thanks to the Statistics Department and Oregon State University for providing this beautiful venue for the IISA 2016 conference.”

The conference is sponsored and supported by the National Science Foundation, Merck, TEOCO, Cytel, the American Statistical Association, Elsevier, SAS Institute, International Chinese Statistical Association, Korean International Statistical Society and OSU’s College of Science, Ecampus and International Progams.

The College of Science will treat mathematics, physics and statistics students and faculty to an evening of movie, dinner and a Skype discussion with OSU alumnus (BS & MS '60) and world famous mathematician, Dr. George Andrews on Thursday, May 26. The group will watch "The Man Who Knew Infinity" the recently released biographical drama film on the life of Indian mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan at Darkside Cinema at 3:30 pm.

The film portrays the relationship between Ramanujan and University of Cambridge number theorist G.H. Hardy in the early 1900s and Ramanujan's experiences with English racism during his visit to Trinity College.

After the movie, the College of Science will host a 45-minute Skype discussion with professor Andrews, who is the Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Among his many towering mathematical achievements, Andrews is perhaps best known for his work on Ramanujan's "Lost Notebook" as it is called in the mathematical community.

A few months before he passed away, Ramanujan had spoken about his new work on theta functions which physicists use in their study of the heat equation. However, he didn't leave behind any published work on the subject and nothing more was known about his contributions to this branch of mathematics until Andrews' amazing find.

Andrews discovered Ramanujan's "Lost Notebook" in a library of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1975. Excitedly leafing through the 100-odd loose pages, Andrews found they contained 600 equations in all—revolutionary mathematical findings on mock theta functions—of which only a fifth had been independently discovered in the years after Ramanujan's death in 1920. In the decades following his discovery, Andrew has co-authored several books that provide proofs of most of the theorems listed in "the Lost Notebook."

Delicious pizza will be served during the discussion. The movie and discussion will give students a renewed appreciation of the human dimensions of mathematics and a fascinating peek at the history and legacy of twentieth-century mathematics.

Mathematics, physics and statistics students and faculty can click here to RSVP today

Source: http://www.pnas.org/content/102/13/4663.full

The College of Science welcomes renowned mathematician Richard Tapia who will present a public science lecture entitled, "Using Mathematics to Enhance My Personal Life," for faculty and students. The event will be held May 11 at 3:00 pm in Snell International Forum at 2150 SW Jefferson Way on campus. REGISTER here. Dr. Tapia is a University Professor in Rice University’s Computational and Applied Mathematics Department, the university’s highest academic title awarded to only seven faculty in its history.

For many years, Dr. Tapia was involved in BMX bicycle racing as a supportive father for his son. He will kick off his talk using several lively videos to identify and illustrate what he calls the "Curse of Lane 8" or "The Fair Lane Assignment Problem in BMX Bicycle Racing." Next, he will use his mathematical training to formulate the issue as a mathematical problem and then solve the problem using a computer while describing the solution technique.

In the second part of this talk, Dr. Tapia will show and describe how he made a riveting video with the help of a dual art and math undergraduate at Rice University that ended up accompanying him as he showed his 1970 Chevelle Malibu SS at car shows across the country. Both the car and video are named, “Heavy Metal.” Check out an interview of Dr. Tapia at the Detroit Autorama 2008.

The American Statistical Association’s Datafest, a nationally coordinated data analysis competition that brings together the data science community, was held at Oregon State University April 15-17, 2016. Nine teams comprising 37 students and faculty from OSU, University of Oregon and Reed College matched up in data competitions and learned more about data science and statistics than you might think is humanly possible in one weekend.

The competitions kicked off at 7:30 pm Friday, April 15 in Weniger Hall and continued through Sunday, April 17 at 4 pm. Students came prepared with laptops locked and loaded with data analysis software and tools.

DataFest Oregon is a celebration of data in which teams of undergraduates work around the clock to find and share meaning in a large, rich, and complex data set. It’s a good way to meet other students interested in data.

Undergraduate and graduate students did the work, working under pressure as part of a team and examined their own critical thinking processes, with assistance from a cadre of roving consultants, including graduate students, faculty, and industry professionals.

After two days of intense data wrangling, analysis, and presentation design, each team developed a mere two presentation slides in just a few minutes in hopes of impressing the panel of judges.

Did we mention the prizes? Prizes, fame and glory (and cool T-shirts) went to the following students who were awarded Best Insight, Best Use of External Data, and Best Visualization. Winners received medals, a book bundle, and a one-year membership to the American Statistical Association.

Best Visualization

Best use of external data

Best insight

Charlotte Wickham, Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at OSU, was instrumental in bringing ASA DataFest to campus for the first time, championing the student competitions, and leading planning and organizing efforts.

DataFest Oregon was sponsored by the College of Science, Department of Statistics, the American Statistical Association, Google and DataCamp and Oregon State University.

Read more about ASA DataFests.

Photos from DataFest Oregon 2016:

Thomas Sharpton, a professor in both microbiology and statistics, will present a Science Pub to clarify exactly what the microbiome is, how it is studied and why it is important to our everyday lives. Sharpton will also discuss how our understanding of the microbiome will ultimately facilitate important social and medical transformations.

This Science Pub event will be held April 11, 2016, from 6 - 8 pm at the Old World Deli, 341 SW 2nd St. in Corvallis.

Recent research has revealed that the human body is covered in a diverse array of microorganisms. Most of these bacteria, viruses and fungi are located in the gastrointestinal tract. This community is collectively referred to as the gut microbiome and plays an important role in human health: disease resistance, some cancers, cardiovascular disease and our mental state. Changes in the microbiome have been linked to acute and chronic diseases and can even affect behavior. These observations raise the issue of what it means to be human.

During a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco, Tom Sharpton developed new ways to analyze microbiome data.

“We take DNA from an entire consortium of cells that comprises the microbial community and sequence them all simultaneously. What we get is an alphabet soup,” he explains. “We use the computer to determine what DNA came from what organism.”

The Science Pub presentation is free and open to the public. Sponsors of Science Pub include OSU's Terra magazine, the Downtown Corvallis Association and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Check out upcoming Science Pubs.

Chaitan Baru, Senior Advisor for Data Science for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at NSF, will visit campus January 15 to present a seminar on current NSF Big Data and Data Science program and activities. Science faculty and students are invited to attend the seminar, which will be held at 9 am in the Valley Library, Willamette Industries Seminar Room (room 3622) on the third floor.

College of Science Dean Sastry G. Pantula was a special guest and keynote speaker at the 2nd International Conference on the Theory and Application of Statistics, which was organized by the Dhaka University Statistics Department Alumni Association (DUSDAA) and began on Sunday, the 65th anniversary of the department’s founding. The Department of Statistics at the University of Dhaka is one of the oldest of its kind in the world and was founded by the late National Professor Qazi Motahar Husain, the first academic statistician of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and founder of the Institute of Statistical Research and Training in 1964.

Held December 27-29, the conference aims to bring statisticians together from around the world to explore new frontiers of developments of statistical theory and applications in teaching, research, and the use of statistics in government and non-government policy making with special focus on developing countries, such as Bangladesh.

Dhaka University Vice-Chancellor Dr. AAMS Arefin Siddique kicked off the three-day conference, calling for the need to upgrade the quality of statistics and statistical analysis to ensure transparency, accountability, credibility and morality. He called for statisticians to work together to fulfill the dream of making Bangladesh a country free from poverty, hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy and fundamentalism.

The fall 2015 Milne Lecture features Peter J. Bickel, a leading figure in the field of statistics and Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He will discuss, “Statistics: The transfer science, Big Data and an experience with ENCODE." The ENCODE project is the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements.