Berkeley Statistics Student Seminar


The essential aim of this seminar is to give students a chance to give talks and inform their peers of the research that they are currently involved in. It also gives an opportunity to students to practice talks before conferences, job talks talks before their qualifying exams and so on. The seminar is generously funded by the Graduate Assembly and the Statistics department. For the Fall 2007 please send me an email if you would like to give a talk. This seminar is being organized jointly by Bradley Luen, Chris Haulk, Richard Liang and myself. All the talks will be held in 1011 Evans, on alternate Fridays from 4-5 p.m.



August 31 Ron Peled On rough isometries of Poisson processes on the line
September 14 Brad Luen Ten things I wish I had known when I came to Berkeley.
October 5 Daniel Ting Hierarchical Dirichlet Process and protein structure.






Abstracts

August 31

Speaker

Ron Peled

Title

On rough isometries of Poisson processes on the line

Abstract:

The notion of rough isometry (or quasi isometry) of metric spaces was invented by Gromov in 81 and developed significantly by Kannai in 85. It provides a way of saying that two metric spaces are somewhat similar to each other, two spaces are rough isometric if their metric is the same up to multiplicative and additive constants. For example, R^2 and Z^2 are rough isometric.

The notion of rough isometry (or quasi isometry) of metric spaces was invented by Gromov in 81 and developed significantly by Kannai in 85. It provides a way of saying that two metric spaces are somewhat similar to each other, two spaces are rough isometric if their metric is the same up to multiplicative and additive constants. For example, R^2 and Z^2 are rough isometric.

All concepts used will be defined, in particular no prior knowledge of rough isometry is assumed

September 14

Speaker

Bradley Luen

Title

Ten things I wish I had known when I came to Berkeley

Abstract:

Berkeley can bewilder statisticians newly arrived from far-off places. Many things I learned in later years, had I known them in those crucial first months, could've prevented me from becoming the jaded, burnt-out wreck I am today. In this talk I'll divulge some of these crucial minutiae, from nonparametric testing to places to get good fruit and vegetables. This short rant will be followed by a panel discussion, during which new students can ask their aged and infirm seniors questions about additional critical concepts. (This is conditional on me shaming other old grads into being on the panel.)

September 14

Speaker

Daniel Ting

Title

Hierarchical Dirichlet Process and protein structure

Abstract:

Given the large existing body of work in DNA sequencing, research has become increasingly focused on determining functions of proteins, the products of genes. One such area of research is protein structure prediction which aims to predict the 3D structure of a protein based using computational methods. I will be describing one component used in solving the protein structure prediction problem and the methodology behind it.
The statistical problem is a density estimation problem for a class of similar densities. Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) mixture models are used to exploit similarities in the densities. I will give an overview of HDPs and the related Chinese restaurant franchise process and present some results from this model applied to the data. After the talk, we will be going to Panda Express to simulate the Chinese restaurant franchise process.

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