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McKelvey School of Engineering

Brown School

‘AI, Beatles, and Election: A nano tour of data science’

Thursday, February 13, 2020 | 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Farrell Learning and Teaching Center, Connor Auditorium
520 S Euclid Ave, St. Louis, Missouri 63110

Join us for a Love Data Week presentation by Xiao-Li Meng, editor-in-chief of the Harvard Data Science Review and professor of statistics at Harvard University.

What is data science (DS)? Some declare DS=CS (Computer Science), some consider DS=S (Statistics), and yet some even think DS=BS (but not Bayesian Statistics).  The truth is that DS is so broad that it is easier to understand it through its (set) complement. From that angle, DS is not just about deep learning, or prediction, or data analysis. It is not a STEM discipline. It is not even a single discipline.

This talk reports Xiao-Li Meng's experience as the founding editor-in-chief of Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR), and as a statistician, in exploring the landscape of DS. He will first demonstrate its vastness by using articles in HDSR, which address questions ranging from “How does AI impact my life?” to “Who wrote In My Life?”. He will then demonstrate how statistical thinking helps to reveal a big data paradox, which provides an explanation of our collective failure in predicting the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as an insight into the 2020 election.

Registration is encouraged but not required.

Event Type

Lectures & Presentations

Schools

School of Medicine

Topic

Science & Technology

Website

https://becker.wustl.edu/civicrm/?pag...

Department
Bernard Becker Medical Library, University Libraries
Event Contact

Laura Swofford, lswofford@wustl.edu

Speaker Information

Xiao-Li Meng, the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, is well known for his depth and breadth in research, his innovation and passion in pedagogy, his vision and effectiveness in administration, as well as for his engaging and entertaining style as a speaker and writer. Meng was named the best statistician under the age of 40 by COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) in 2001, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his more than 150 publications in at least a dozen theoretical and methodological areas, as well as in areas of pedagogy and professional development. He has delivered more than 400 research presentations and public speeches on these topics, and he is the author of “The XL-Files," a thought-provoking and entertaining column in the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) Bulletin. His interests range from the theoretical foundations of statistical inferences (e.g., the interplay among Bayesian, Fiducial, and frequentist perspectives; frameworks for multi-source, multi-phase and multi- resolution inferences) to statistical methods and computation (e.g., posterior predictive p-value; EM algorithm; Markov chain Monte Carlo; bridge and path sampling) to applications in natural, social, and medical sciences and engineering (e.g., complex statistical modeling in astronomy and astrophysics, assessing disparity in mental health services, and quantifying statistical information in genetic studies). Meng received his BS in mathematics from Fudan University in 1982 and his PhD in statistics from Harvard in 1990. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago from 1991 to 2001 before returning to Harvard, where he served as the Chair of the Department of Statistics (2004-2012) and the Dean of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2012-2017). 

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