IFDS members Po-Ling Loh and Rob Nowak, together with colleagues from the UK, are organizing a semester long program on “Statistical Scalability” at the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge, January-June 2018. The program’s theme is the simultaneous consideration of the methodological, theoretical and computational challenges involved in ‘Big Data’ analysis, as well as the development of robust, scalable methods that are crucial to unlocking the potential of data. Experts from around the world will spend time at the Institute during the semester (some for the full period, others for shorter visits), including IFDS members Garvesh Raskutti and Rebecca Willett. The program includes four week-long workshops, on topics ranging from the algorithmic underpinnings of Big Data analysis to the heterogeneity and geometry of large-scale datasets. Loh is co-organizing a workshop on “Big Data challenges: heterogeneity, model misspecification and changepoints,” and Nowak is co-organizing a workshop on “Future challenges in statistical scalability.” It promises to be an exciting and fruitful semester at the Isaac Newton Institute, and it will certainly benefit and inform the IFDS research activities. More…
