2023-05-12
- Five years ago, and with only 18 students, Illinois Computer Science professor Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider began shepherding a remarkable transformation for the new course offering, Data Science Discovery, alongside professor ...
2023-05-01 - The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences has awarded funding to three teams of faculty and staff to advance innovative ideas that aim to improve student experiences, from incorporating one-on-one mentorship with teaching to offering Illinois undergrads and incarcerated individuals the opportunity to learn together. The college issued a call for LAS Student Success Innovation proposals earlier...
2023-03-22 - In anticipation for the upcoming 2023 Datathon, let's revisit last year's Datathon and check in with one of the winners, Peiwen Zhang. The Datathon, held every year, challenges hundreds of students to tackle a real-world problem using data. Participants can expect to utilize a variety of data cleaning and visualization software to present a solution for the problem statement. Last year's prompt...
2023-03-13 - George Herman “Babe” Ruth is a baseball legend. He’s the “Great Bambino.” The “Sultan of Swat.” From 1914-1935, Ruth consistently crushed the ball, breaking nearly every standing batting record and tallying a career 714 home runs. By many accounts, the Boston Red Sox star pitcher turned New York Yankee slugger is still considered the greatest baseball player of all time. But, should he be?...
2023-03-07 - The Stat-MS Prep Track at the University of Illinois is an opportunity for upperclassmen who are interested in pursuing a master's degree in statistics to get a head start on their coursework. The program is designed for students who are close to completing their undergraduate degree and have extra time in their schedules. By taking advantage of this spare time, students can begin their master's...
2023-02-28 - Ten university teams have been selected to participate in the live interactions phase of the Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge. As of February, those teams have advanced to the semifinals based on their performance during the initial customer feedback period. Alexa customers can interact with their SimBots by saying "Alexa,...
2023-02-02 - The American Statistical Association (ASA) have named two Illinois Statistics-PhD students as recipients of ASA Student Paper Competition awards. Rong Tang and Rentian Yao are among the award winners of their respective categories based on the quality and content of their submissions. Tang, a fifth-year PhD student, has been named as one of the three winners of the ASA Nonparametric Statistics...
2023-01-30 - On December 7th, students and faculty gathered for the Fall 2022 Undergrad Research Symposium. URES allows students to work with experienced faculty on a research project, which is then presented at the end-of-semester event. I visited the Campus Instructional Facility to see the different types of research that had been conducted this semester. I first spoke with Gillian Gabriel, the event’s...
2023-01-24 - Two Statistics PhD students were recognized for their exceptional work at the 2022 International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) conference. Fourth-year PhD student, Kaustav Chakraborty, received third place in the Student Poster Competition for his research entitled "Efficient Model Fitting and Two-Sample Testing for Large Networks via Subsampling." The selection of poster award...
2023-01-09 - Karle Flanagan and Alex Stepanov have been chosen as the inaugural recipients of the Department of Statistics Award for Excellence in Instruction. This award recognizes the impact that instructors have on their students by taking a holistic approach to understanding how faculty members facilitate the learning experience. The award will be presented at the Spring 2023 Bohrer Workshop in April. The...
2023-01-09 - Professor Naveen Narisetty was honored with the inaugural Early Career Award in Statistics and Data Sciences (ECASDS) at the Indian International Statistical Association (IISA) conference, held from December 26-30, 2022 in Bangalore, India. This award recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of statistics and data science by IISA members and replaces the Young Statistical Scientist Award...
2022-12-19 - There is a fascinating, intricate science behind America’s favorite pastime. Statistics and data science have quickly become a vital asset to MLB organizations. If this interests you, you may enjoy the new Stat 430: Baseball Analytics with Professor Daniel Eck. Even if you aren’t particularly a sports fan, this course offers a multitude of skills which could be applied to other careers in data...
2022-12-13 - After the onset of COVID-19, policymakers were dismayed by many people who avoided personal and public safety measures designed to curb the spread of the virus. Many social scientists mobilized to better understand this behavior, including Jake Bowers, a professor of political science and statistics...
2022-11-03 - The Department of Statistics is pleased to announce the opening of the nomination period for the inaugural Excellence in Instruction Award. The Statistics Department Award for Excellence in Instruction recognizes consistently outstanding instruction by a faculty member of the Statistics department. This award is given annually to honor a faculty member in the department who epitomizes the highest...
2022-11-02 - Yubo Zhuang, second-year Statistics-PhD student, was recently notified of being awarded a 2022 NeuIPS 2022 Scholar Award for his paper titled “Wasserstein K-means for clustering probability distributions.” The Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022) is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in machine learning,...