February 24, 2014

Inaugural StatsWeek event a great success

The National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) hosted more than 100 professional and academic researchers during StatsWeek 2014 in early February.

StatsWeek consisted of three events running from 3-7 February: A one-and-a-half-day course on spatio-temporal statistical modelling was delivered by Professor Peter Diggle of Lancaster University (UK) and Distinguished Professor Noel Cressie of UOW; a two-day lesson on nonparametric statistics was taught by Olivier Thas of Ghent University (Belgium); while the 6^th Applied Statistics Education and Research Collaboration Conference saw keynote speeches by Dr. Bronwyn Harch, Chief of CSIRO’s Computational Informatics (CCI) and Professor Peter Diggle. 

Professor Diggle’s keynote was a public lecture co-sponsored by the Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute (IHMRI). 

Other featured speakers include Dr. Siu-Ming Tam from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Dr. Doug Shaw from the Statistical Society of Australia Inc. (SSAI) and Prof. Geoff Prince from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI).

Prof David Steel, Director of NIASRA said: “This was our first StatsWeek at UOW and [it] was a great success.  It brought together applied statisticians in governments, industry and universities to share major developments in statistical methods that are being used to tackle important problems in environmental, biological, agricultural, health and social sciences”.

Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, Prof. Chris Cook, said StatsWeek demonstrated the leading role that statisticians are taking in helping scientists and researchers exploit the huge data resources now available to them.

StatsWeek drew participants from Australia, New Zealand, and America.  Several organisations were represented at the event, including the Defence Science and Technology Organization, CSIRO, the NSW Ministry of Health, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as well as a number of Universities, including those of Newcastle and Western Sydney.

The Statistical Society of Australia Inc. and CSIRO helped to sponsor StatsWeek 2014.

NIASRA has a number of other events planned for 2014 and has already begun work on StatsWeek 2015. For more information, visit the NIASRA website at niasra.uow.edu.au or contact Anica Damcevski (anica@uow.edu.au).