Workshop: Explorations in Statistics Research

Date: Saturday, June 13 to Saturday , June 20, 2009

Location: U.C. Berkeley


Speakers

Jasjeet Sekhon

Jasjeet S. Sekhon is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on methods for causal inference in observational and experimental studies and evaluating social science, public health and medical interventions. Professor Sekhon has done research on elections, voting behavior and public opinion in the United States, multivariate matching methods for causal inference, machine learning algorithms for irregular optimization problems, robust estimators with bounded influence functions, health economic cost effectiveness analysis, and the philosophy and history of inference and statistics in the social sciences.

Chris Volinsky

Chris Volinsky is Director of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Research in Florham Park, N.J. Chris got his PhD from the University of Washington in 1997 studying Bayesian Model Averaging. He joined AT&T Researchi in 1997 and became Director of the Statistics Research Department in 2004. His research at AT&T focuses on large scale data mining: recommender systems, social networks, statistical computation, and anomaly detection. Chris was on the team that won $50,000 Progress Prizes in 2007 and 2008 as part of the Netflix Prize competition, a $1M open competition to build the best recommendation algorithm using Netflix data.

Claudia Tebaldi

Claudia Tebaldi is a Research Scientist at Climate Central, Princeton, NJ, a new non-profit organization dedicated to the synthesis and communication of the science and the solutions of climate change. Her research focuses on the analysis and statistical characterization of climate change projections and their uncertainty, as derived from climate models, especially at the regional scale. She is particularly interested in the relation between climate models performance in simulating current climate and the reliability of their simulations of future climate. She is a contributing author of IPCC AR4, for Chapter 10, Global Climate Projections, and Chapter 11, Regional Climate Projections, by Working Group I and Chapter 2, New Assessment Methods and the Characterization of Future Conditions, by Working Group II. Claudia got her PhD in Statistics from Duke University, then completed a post-doctoral appointment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO where she subsequently worked as a project scientist for 8 years, and where she is still based as a visiting scientist, collaborating with NCAR climate scientists and statisticians.


Last modified: Jun 10 2009