When Joni Ricks-Oddie became the first full-time director for the Center for Statistical Consulting in February 2018, her goal was to make the center a “one-stop shop” for data analysis. By also serving as head of the more medical- and clinical-focused Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) unit within the Institute for Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS), she aimed to better align the two groups to address a wide variety of campus and community needs. Since then, the Center for Statistical Consulting has redesigned its website to better advertise its services, hired an additional senior statistician and developed more training sessions, and entered into a new partnership that expands the center’s reach.

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Two statistics Ph.D. students in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), Olivia Bernstein and Jaylen Lee, have earned Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) provides a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 in addition to paying $12,000 to the university to cover the recipient’s tuition and fees.

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How can we leverage data science to make the world a better place? This is the question Statistics Professor Emerita Jessica Utts is pushing aspiring data scientists to consider. Through an endowment of $115,000 to the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), Utts has funded a new scholarship in her parents’ name that will provide an annual $5,000 scholarship for an undergraduate data science major. The Richard and Patricia Utts Data Science for Social Good Award will require applicants to write an essay in which they propose a new idea for how data science can be used for social good.

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Assistant Professor of Statistics Weining Shen’s recent paper in Circulation, a top journal in the field of cardiology, focuses on a complex topic — cardiac hypertrophic growth — but the main goal of his work is simple: apply statistics to improve healthcare. The paper, “Lin28a Regulates Pathological Cardiac Hypertrophic Growth through Pck2-Mediated Enhancement of Anabolic Synthesis,” stems from Shen’s work with Dr. Li Qian and Jiandong Liu at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it isn’t the first paper resulting from Shen’s ongoing collaboration with Qian, Liu and their lab group.

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How will technology trends and advances in computing influence various industries and affect our day-to-day lives in 2019? Offering predictions for the year ahead are three faculty members from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science (ICS):

• Assistant Professor of Informatics Stacy Branham, whose research sits at the intersection of human-centered computing and accessible computing;
• Professor of Statistics Michele Guindani, an expert in Bayesian modeling and the analysis of high-dimensional data; and
• Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sang-Woo Jun, who works on building innovative system architectures for low-cost high-performance computing.

Here, Branham, Guindani and Jun discuss everything from universal usability and mobile health to future computer architectures, weighing in on what they think will be the top trends of the year.

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UCI graduate Andrew Holbrook, Ph.D. ’18, was recently selected as a finalist for the Savage Award in Theory and Methods for his dissertation and its contribution to Bayesian statistics. “This is by far one of the most prestigious awards in our field,” says Associate Professor of Statistics Babak Shahbaba, Holbrook’s Ph.D. adviser. “Regardless of the final outcome, this is a great accomplishment [and] a testament to his hard work and dedication.”

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Faculty and graduate students representing all three departments of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 18). At the internationally renowned forum for software engineering researchers, practitioners and educators, software engineering Ph.D. students Vaibhav Saini and Farima Farmahinifarahani, along with their adviser, Informatics Professor Crista Lopes, and statistics Ph.D. student Yadong Lu and his advisor, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Pierre Baldi, were recognized for their paper, “Oreo: Detection of Clones in the Twilight Zone.”

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Bite marks, shoe prints, crime-scene fibers: Matches to suspects are often far shakier than courtroom experts claim. Better statistical methods — among them, a little beast known as the “likelihood ratio” — can cut down on wrong convictions.

Read the full story/comic at Knowable Magazine.

The 2018 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Department of Statistics is Ph.D. student Olivia Bernstein. A skilled researcher with experience in data analytics and chemistry, Bernstein says the secret to being a good TA is to have the “patience to explain concepts in different ways to students.” She also stresses the need to “keep up on the administrative parts of the job.” While still unsure of her future plans, her goal is to pursue something related to statistics research.