Rao Prize Conference on May 6, 2019 features statistics prize winner
The Penn State Department of Statistics will host the 2019 Rao Prize Conference on Monday, May 6, 2019 in 100 Life Sciences Building on the Penn State University Park campus. This one-day conference, which is free and open to the public, begins with registration at 8:30 a.m. followed by the award ceremony and lectures continuing throughout the day until 5:40 p.m. The full schedule of events and speaker abstracts are online.
One of the highlights of the conference is the award of the 2019 Rao Prize to Grace Wahba, IJ Schoenberg-Hilldale Professor of Statistics Emeritus in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wahba is well known for her work on smoothing noisy data with splines, the development of generalized cross-validation, and Wahba’s problem. Her research interests include multivariate function estimation, statistical model building, and the development of efficient numerical and statistical methods for large and extremely large data sets. Wahba is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She has received the COPSS Fisher Award, the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Researcher Award, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.
From left to right: Grace Wahba, Tailen Hsing, Doug Nychka
The conference also honors two distinguished statisticians: Tailen Hsing, Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan, who will present the C. G. Khatri Lecture; and Doug Nychka, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the Colorado School of Mines, who will present the P. R. Krishnaiah Lecture.
Top row from left to right: Ming Yuan, Bharath K. Sriperumbudur. Bottom row from left to right: Alex Smola, Hao Helen Zhang.
The conference program consists of the three plenary speakers, four invited speakers, and a poster presentation by graduate students. The three plenary speakers are Professors Wahba, Hsing, and Nychka. The four invited speakers are Ming Yuan, professor of statistics at Columbia University; Bharath K. Sriperumbudur, assistant professor of statistics at Penn State;Alex Smola, Director of Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services ; and Hao Helen Zhang, professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona.
The C.R. and Bhargavi Rao Prize was established to honor and recognize outstanding and influential innovations in the theory and practice of mathematical statistics, international leadership in directing statistics research, and pioneering contributions by a recognized leader in the field of statistics. The C. G. Khatri Memorial Lectureship and P. R. Krishnaiah Memorial Lectureship honor the memory of C. G. Khatri and P. R. Krishnaiah by inviting outstanding researchers in statistics to deliver lectures at Penn State.
Right photo: Top row from left to right: Ming Yuan, Bharath K. Sriperumbudur. Bottom row from left to right: Alex Smola, Hao Helen Zhang.