Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research

William F. Eddy, the John C. Warner Professor of Statistics (Emeritus) in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, is the 2016 winner of the National Institute for Statistical Science (NISS) Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research. William received the award for, “serving as a model statistician engaged in cross-disciplinary research, including his pioneering work at the interface of statistics and computing, his research over several decades on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, his contributions to the analysis of census data and statistics in forensic science, and especially for introducing hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students to cross-disciplinary research outside the classroom.” The NISS Board of Trustees established the Jerome Sacks Award in 2000 to honor Sacks’ service as the founding director of NISS. The annual prize of $1,000, presented at the NISS JSM Reception, recognizes sustained, high-quality cross-disciplinary research involving the statistical sciences.

See http://niss.org/about/awards/jerome-sacks-award-outstanding-cross-disciplinary-research

CF Jeff Wu named Inaugural Akaike Memorial Lecturer

The Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM) and the Japan Statistical Society (JSS) have inaugurated the Akaike Memorial Lecture Award under their joint sponsorship. A memorial to the legacy of Dr. Hirotugu Akaike, we hope that this lecture will be a valuable stimulus to the minds of younger colleagues and contribute to the development of the statistical sciences.

The inaugural lecture will be given by Professor C.F. Jeff Wu of Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The lecture will be at the planning session of the JSS for the 2016 Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting, which will be held at Kanazawa University from September 4–7, 2016.

C.F. Jeff Wu was born in Taiwan in 1949. He obtained his BSc (Mathematics) from the National Taiwan University in 1971, and his PhD in Statistics from Berkeley in 1976. Prof. Wu has conducted vigorous and pioneering work on the theory of experimental design, EM algorithms and resampling. His support of industry has also been highly valued and he has received many awards in statistical quality control. He has long recognized the importance of data science; on entering his post as H.C. Carver Professor at Michigan University in 1997, he gave a speech titled “Statistics = Data Science?” in which he emphasized the role of analysis of large volumes of data and cooperation with people in fields outside of statistics. More recently, he has proposed new methods for experimental design, adapted to the procedures of experiments performed on computers (simulations). Prof. Wu has maintained an exemplary balance among theory, procedure and applications in his research. Since he first came to Japan in 1987 together with Prof. G.E.P. Box to observe quality control in industries, he has visited this country many times and continued exchanges with Japanese statisticians and the industrial sector. Prof. Wu has also visited ISM on several occasions to lecture and engage in discussions and debates with our young researchers.

International Biometric Society names Honorary Life Members

By a vote of the Representative Council of IBS, the International Biometric Society, three longtime members have been named Honorary Life Members of IBS. Two of them, Kaye Basford (Australasia Region) and Thomas Louis (ENAR), are IMS members. They were honored at an awards ceremony during the International Biometric Conference (IBC) in Victoria, BC, in July, along with Peter Bauer (Austro-Swiss Region).