Workshop “Advances in Statistical Disclosure Limitation”, held on the 5th Feb 2020 at UOW
Given the fact that more and more personal and business data can be easily collected through surveys, social media, medical records, high-tech monitoring and tracking systems, resulting in “big data”, the issues associated with data protection are of serious concern to society and individuals. Data privacy has become a hot topic in terms of the data systems that we are all subject to and in scientific research. With support from NIASRA, Associate Professor Yan-Xia Lin organized a one-day workshop “Advanced in Statistical Disclosure Limitations” on 5th February 2020, which attracted more than 35 participants. More than 80% of them are international researchers from the USA, UK, and Italy and national researchers (from ABS, SCIRO-DATA61, ANU, USYD, and UOW) working in the area of data privacy and data security.
James Chipperfield appointed to key positions at the International Association of Survey Statisticians
James Chipperfield, an Honorary Principal Fellow at NIASRA and Assistant Director at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, was recently appointed to be a Vice President and the Scientific Secretary of the International Association for Survey Statisticians (IASS) from 2019 to 2021. The roles involves recruiting people to write book reviews and articles about new and emerging methods for the Survey Statistician (see January 2020 Issue) and keeping members up-to-date on relevant upcoming conferences and workshops through the monthly IASS newsletter. The roles, as part of the Executive IASS Committee, include promoting survey statistics internationally by funding and organizing invited sessions and presentations at workshops and conferences. If you are interested in contributing to the Survey Statistician please contact James at james.chipperfield@abs.gov.au and if you are interested in becoming a member please visit http://isi-iass.org/home/
Professor Marijka Batterham's interview is on WIN News Illawarra
Senior Professor Brian Cullis and Associate Professor Alison Smith recently gave the prestigious 39th Fisher Memorial lecture
The lecture was part of a conference celebrating the life and work of statistician, evolutionary biologist and geneticist, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher. The event seeks to maintain his scientific legacy by encouraging discussion of the scientific fields in which he was active.
Using data mining to help people lose weight
Professor Marijka Batterham says data mining may be able to help us determine the characteristics of people who drop out of weight loss trials and programs, or who has been unsuccessful in losing weight, and therefore can help us design better diets. Professor Batterham began her dig into weight loss intervention programs in 2013. After analysing a collection of weight loss programs, she found the most successful participants lost weight rapidly initially, had a higher initial body mass index, and maintained the weight loss for the rest of the study. The least successful participants were those who slowly lost weight initially.
Inference for Spatio-Temporal Changes of Arctic Sea Ice
The Statistical Society is pleased to invite you to the first episode of our new webinar series. Kicking off the series will be Noel Cressie, Distinguished Professor and Director, Centre for Environmental Informatics, University of Wollongong and 2014 Pitman Medal winner, speaking about
Inference for Spatio-Temporal Changes of Arctic Sea Ice
Arctic sea-ice extent has been of considerable interest to scientists recently, mainly due to its decreasing trend over the past 20 years. In this talk, we propose a hierarchical spatio-temporal generalised linear model (GLM) for binary Arctic-sea-ice data, where data dependencies are introduced through a latent dynamic spatio-temporal linear mixed-effects model.
Dr Krivitsky receives 2019 Freeman Award and shares the 2019 Richards Award at the International Network for Social Network Analysis Sunbelt Conference 2019
The annual International Network for Social Network Analysis Sunbelt Conference took place 18–23 June 2019 in Montreal. For his contributions to methodology for social network modelling—including pioneering work in dynamic network models, networks with weighted relations, understanding effects of network size, and inference from nonstandard network data—and for his contributions to the community by developing user-friendly software tools and teaching workshops, Dr Krivitsky received the Freeman Award, given biennially or annually to an early- or mid-career researcher for eminent contributions to the study of social networks. He will give a plenary session at the 2020 conference in Paris.
For their development of the Statnet, a suite of user-friendly R packages for describing, visualising, and statistically modelling network data, Profs Mark Handcock (UCLA), Martina Morris, Steven Goodreau (University of Washington), David Hunter (Penn State University), Dr Pavel Krivitsky (University of Wollongong), and Mr Skye Bender-deMoll received the biennial Richards Award for social network analysis software.
University of Wollongong represented at the International Network for Social Network Analysis Sunbelt Conference 2019
The annual International Network for Social Network Analysis Sunbelt Conference took place 18–23 June 2019 in Montreal. The University of Wollongong was represented by two speakers Dr Pavel Krivitsky and Dr James Ng.
Dr Krivitsky presented his current work—joint with Prof Neil Hens and Dr Pietro Coletti from University of Hasselt—on methods for determining when inference from a sample of networks can be generalised to their population. Dr James Ng presented his work, joint with Andrew Zammit-Mangion on spatial network models for analysing bike sharing systems.
Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) Canberra Meetings 2019
28 March | 2019
Matt Moores will be presenting at the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) Canberra Meeting on 25 June 2019. The title of his presentation is “Statistics from Mars: Bayesian signal processing for Raman spectroscopy”.
Research Assessments of Statistics Discipline at UOW
27 March | 2019
In the 2018 Australian Research Council’s assessment of Excellence in Research for Australia results released recently the Statistics discipline at UOW received the maximum rating of 5, corresponding to “well above world standard”. This achievement follows the QS World University Rankings 2019, in which Statistics and Operations Research at UOW was ranked in the top 200 worldwide.
Associate Lecturer/Lecturer Positions Available
22 March | 2019
The School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics (SMAS) is seeking to appoint two enthusiastic and capable statisticians to undertake academic duties consistent with ongoing Associate Lecture (Level A) or Lecturer (Level B) appointments.
Stats Week 2019
20 March | 2019
Approximately 70 guests attended a series of short courses presented by NIASRA. Click to read more about Microbiome Data Analysis by Olivier Thas, Assessing Measurement, Reliability and Validity by Professor Angie Wade, and Sample Survey Methods by Professor David Steel.
Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses
20 March | 2019
22 guests attended this three-day course presented by Dr Elizabeth Neale, Professor Marijka Batterham, and Professor Isabel Ferreira. The course consisted of a mixture of lectures, to cover essential theoretical background, and hands-on tutorials and computer exercises, to provide practical experience with analyses of real meta-analytic datasets. Click to read the course program.
2018 Southern Cross University Excellence in Engagement Award for Community Impact
13 March | 2019
Congratulations to Nicole Cocks and Brian Cullis on their receipt of the 2018 Southern Cross University Excellence in Engagement Award for Community Impact, for demonstrated community impact on Pacific Island fishers through technical capacity, building on improved postharvest processing of fishery catches.
Workshop: Spatio-Temporal Statistics with R
8 March | 2019
A 1.5 Day Workshop in Sydney presented by Noel Cressie and Andrew Zammit Mangion (NIASRA, UOW), 29 April (whole day) and 30 April (half day), 2019, Sydney Business School, University of Wollongong.
CBB Summer Scholars
1 March | 2019
In the summer of 2018-2019 six SMAS students were awarded CBB scholarships to assist with the analysis of National Variety Trials. They were Monique Jordan, Nicholas Lambert, Sam McEwan, Jesse Rand, Matthew Sainsbury-Dale and Lu Wang.
Centre for Bioinformatics and Biometrics 2018 Summer Scholar presentations
21 February | 2019
CBB invites you to attend a series of presentations from summer scholarship students. The CBB scholars were employed on the Bioinformatics and Biometrics for the Australian Grain Industries (BBAG) project funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation. The project they were involved in is the National Variety Trials (NVT).
New Book: Spatio-Temporal Statistics with R
1 February | 2019
The Chapman & Hall/CRC book: "Spatio-Temporal Statistics with R” by Chris Wikle, Andrew Zammit-Mangion, and Noel Cressie is now available. It makes hierarchical spatio-temporal modelling accessible to scientists and engineers solving important practical problems and needing software that is reliable and methodologically rigorous.
Design of Experiments for Generalized Linear Models
8 January | 2019
Ken Russell, honorary professor in NIASRA, has written a book on the design of experiments when the data to be collected will be analysed by a generalized linear model (GLM). The book concentrates on situations where the predictor variables are ‘interval’ or ‘ratio’ in nature.
NIASRA represented at the Australian Social Network Analysis Conference 2018
11 December | 2018
The third annual Australian Social Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC) took place 27–28 November 2018 at the Australian National University in Canberra. NIASRA was represented by two speakers, both giving talks on analysis of multiple networks.
J. B. Douglas Awards Day 2018
4 December | 2018
The NSW branch of the Statistical Society of Australia (SSAI) held the 19th Annual J.B. Douglas Awards on Wednesday 28th November 2018 at UTS.
Major ARC Grant Success
3 December | 2018
NIASRA’s Distinguished Prof Noel Cressie and Dr Andrew Zammit Mangion in the Centre for Environmental Informatics, in collaboration with Dr Ann Stavert from CSIRO, have been awarded a major grant by the Australian Research Council for the ARC Discovery Project, Bayesian inversion and computation applied to atmospheric flux fields.
Recruiting Two Professors in Statistical Science
13 November | 2018
The University of Wollongong is seeking to appoint two Professors: Professor in Statistics and Director NIASRA – Continuing, full-time appointment, and Professor of Biostatistics – Five-year contract, full time appointment.
Dr Renate Meyer from the University of Auckland, NZ, gives inaugural Statistical Science Lecture on 31 October 2018
12 November | 2018
On 31 October, Dr Meyer delivered the 2018 Statistical Science Lecture: “Surfing Gravitational Waves — Black Holes and Bayesian Nonparametrics,” with approximately 50 attendees including UOW physicists and colleagues from UTS.
Dist./Prof Noel Cressie receives 2018 Moyal Medal and gives Moyal Lecture on 1 November 2018
8 November | 2018
The Medal and Lecture is in honour of Professor Joe Moyal and is awarded annually by Macquarie University to a scientist for their distinguished research contributions in at least one of Mathematics, Physics, or Statistics.
Lauren Borg awarded at AusCanola Conference
7 November | 2018
Lauren Borg attended the AusCanola conference in Perth to showcase her work in examining variety by environment interaction in canola blackleg expression experiments. She was named as the inaugural winner of the Phil Salisbury Early Career Researcher Award.
Inaugural Statistical Science Lecture
31 October | 2018
The School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics Inaugural Statistical Science Lecture (SSL) will take place on Wednesday 31 October with guest lecturer Dr Renate Meyer (Department of Statistics, University of Auckland, NZ) presenting: Surfing Gravitational Waves – Black Holes and Bayesian Nonparametrics
Noel Cressie chosen to be the Moyal Medallist and Lecturer for 2018
4 September | 2018
Macquarie University, through its Department of Mathematics and Statistics, has a Medal and a Lecture series in honour of Professor Joe Moyal. The Moyal Lecture is given annually at the university by a scientist who, before the lecture, receives a Moyal Medal for their distinguished contributions to research in at least one of Mathematics, Physics, or Statistics.
Research in Protecting Data Privacy
1 August | 2018
Protecting data privacy while sharing the statistical information in the data to the public forms a significant research area in the recent decade and is a major research direction in NIASRA. After several research papers accepted by international Journals and international conferences recently, we have four research papers accepted by the major conference “Privacy in Statistical Databases 2018" (PSD2018).
Pavel Krivitsky and team awarded U.S. NIH grant
16 July | 2018
Dr Pavel Krivitsky is part of an international team awarded 3 million dollars by the US National Institutes of Health on a project titled "EpiModel 2.0: Integrated Network Models for HIV/STI Prevention Science".
Andrew Zammit Mangion and team awarded UOW Global Challenges grant
5 July | 2018
Andrew Zammit Mangion is part of a team awarded $48,700 through the UOW Global Challenges (Projects) program for the project “Eco-Antarctica – An Antarctic-wide observing system for near-shore and terrestrial ecosystems”.
A new REML (parameter expanded) EM algorithm for linear mixed models
4 June | 2018
The paper A new REML (parameter expanded) EM algorithm for linear mixed models by Simon Diffey, Alison Smith. Alan Welsh and Brian Cullis published in Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics, was one of the journal’s top 20 most downloaded recent papers.
Noel Cressie elected to Australian Academy of Science
22 May | 2018
World-leading statistical scientist recognised for contribution to research across the sciences.
Independent review recommends further investment in world-leading ESRC longitudinal studies
8 May | 2018
Professor Ray Chambers of NIASRA was a member of an independent international panel of experts, chaired by Professor Pamela Davis-Kean, University of Michigan, that has just published its review of the longitudinal studies funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK.
Professor Bronwyn Harch appointed as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Queensland
20 April | 2018
Professor Bronwyn Harch has been appointed as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Queensland (UQ), effective 16 July 2018.
Brian Cullis and Alison Smith invited to give Fisher Memorial Lecture
12 April | 2018
Senior Professor Brian Cullis and Associate Professor Alison Smith have been invited to give the prestigious 39th Fisher Memorial lecture.
PhD scholarship available
20 March | 2018
A PhD scholarship is available in the School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics (SMAS) at the University of Wollongong in the areas of statistical/machine learning and spatio-temporal modelling.
Four positions in Mathematics and Statistical Science
31 January | 2018
The following positions are available: Associate Lecturer/Lecturer in Statistical Sciences, Lecturer in Statistics, Associate Lecturer/Lecturer in Applied Mathematics, Associate Lecturer/Lecturer in Mathematics.
Statistics investment to underpin grains research advances
19 January | 2018
The Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) has announced a major new investment aimed at strengthening and enhancing national and regional grains research outcomes.
Belz Lecture 2017: A Bird's-Eye View of Statistics for Remote Sensing Data
5 December | 2017
The 2017 Belz Lecture was given by Distinguished Professor Noel Cressie on October 31 at University of Melbourne.
Discovery Early Career Research Award for Andrew Zammit Mangion
10 November | 2017
Dr Andrew Zammit Mangion in the Centre for Environmental Informatics, NIASRA, has been awarded a prestigious ARC DECRA. The award has funding of $348,575 that will enable Andrew to undertake the project Deep space-time models for modelling complex environmental phenomena.
Yu Ma wins AMSI Internship with ABS
12 September | 2017
PhD student Yu Ma has been awarded an AMSI Internship to undertake a collaborative project with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. (ABS).
Noel Cressie awarded Georges Matheron Lecturership 2017
12 September | 2017
Professor Noel Cressie was awarded the Georges Matheron Lectureship 2017. He gave a talk titled "A conditional approach to multivariate geostatistics" at the annual meeting of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences in Perth, Australia.
Ray Chambers presented at Rao Conference 2017
25 July | 2017
The School of Mathematics and Statistics at Yunnan University in Kunming, China, hosted a conference called "Contemporary Theory and Practice of Survey Sampling - A celebration of Research Contributions of J. N. K. Rao" celebrating Professor Rao's research contributions.
Major Research Projects in Bioinformatics and Biometrics for the Australian Grains Industry funded
24 July | 2017
Professor Brian Cullis and his team in the Centre for Bioinformatics and Biometrics (CBB) have developed and been awarded two very large and significant R&D projects from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) totalling $7,300,000 to UOW.
Helani Kottage attended the Modern Modeling Methods Conference 2017
21 June | 2017
Helani Kottage, a PhD candidate of School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics attended the Modern Modeling Methods Conference 2017 at the University of Connecticut from 22nd -25th May, 2017.
Noel Cressie visited Capitol Hill as part of the 7th annual Climate Science Day
12 May | 2017
On March 21, Distinguished Professor Noel Cressie visited Capitol Hill as part of the 7th annual Climate Science Day. Professor Cressie had the opportunity to discuss climate science issues with policy staff members of the Ohio Congressional delegation. “My pitch was to be a resource for them in matters of the environment and climate-change impacts, which I think is how we can make a real difference.”
A new approach to relative risk regression
19 April | 2017
Associate Professor Robert Clark and Dr Margo Barr have recently published a paper in Statistical Methods in Medical Research which introduces a blended link approach to relative risk regression.
Rigorous Inference for Social Network Models based on Egocentric Data, and its Implications for Epidemiology of HIV
10 April | 2017
What to do when you want to understand disease spread over a social network… but you can’t actually observe the network?
NIASRA member Dr. Krivitsky has recently published a paper in Annals of Applied Statistics describing an approach for fitting whole-network models to egocentrically-sampled data: data where the researchers can only observe limited information about a small sample of individuals and non-identifying information about their partners. This facilitates simulation of what the whole network might look like, and how it might mediate the spread of disease.
Workshop: Frontiers in Social Statistics Methodology
17 February | 2017
The National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) of the University of Wollongong presented a one-day workshop on emerging topics in quantitative social and health research methodology, consisting of nine talks covering an array of recent developments and trends in social statistical analysis and design.
Dr Andrew Zammit-Mangion on Global Challenges Program funded travel to the University of Bristol, UK
26 January | 2017
On 27 January 2017, Dr Zammit-Mangion will travel to the University of Bristol, UK for a month. The visit is part of an ongoing collaboration between the University of Wollongong, the University of Bristol, and the University of Melbourne, for developing statistical methods for establishing the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide from satellite data. The travel is partially funded by the Global Challenges Program at the University of Wollongong.
Number cruncher puts R&D on the fast track
25 January | 2017
University of Wollongong researcher and former honours student Daniel Tolhurst’s move into medical mathematics is helping to revolutionise the quality testing of Australian Prime Hard wheat and could one day expand the areas in which it can be grown.
Dr Sandy Burden has been awarded an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship for 2017 - 2019
25 January | 2017
Her research aims to develop statistical tools to improve prediction of environmental exceedances (locations where the environmental process of interest exceeds a given threshold). It is motivated by the compelling need to predict the effect of changing greenhouse gas concentrations on Earth's atmosphere for political, social and economic decision making.
PhD Scholarship position available in NIASRA
20 January | 2017
A PhD Scholarship position is available in NIASRA at the School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics (SMAS) at the University of Wollongong, to work in the area of statistical modelling for spatial environmental processes. The UOW scholarship is for three (3) years full-time, with a top-up scholarship available for outstanding candidates.
Dr. Pavel Krivitsky of NIASRA invited to Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences Workshop on Dynamic Networks
12-16 December | 2016
The Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge University hosts themed programmes on mathematics and mathematical sciences with a wide range of application. As a part of their series on social network analysis, Dr. Krivitsky was invited to present at a workshop on dynamic networks --- networks that evolve over time.
Dr. Krivitsky spoke about what to do when you don’t get to observe the network directly, but rather from the point of view of just each individual in the network. Is statistical inference for whole network models even possible? It turns out that for exponential-family random graph models, it is.
Australian Network Scientists Network in Australia
16-17 November | 2016
A 2-day inaugural Australian Social Network Analysis Conference took place at Swinburne University in Hawthorn. How do you test if a friend of a friend is a friend in a social network? It turns out that different people having different propensities to have friends can look like that, even if there is no pressure to close a friendship triad. Dr. Pavel Krivitsky gave a presentation comparing different approaches for accounting for individual heterogeneity when modelling friend-of-a-friend effects in social networks.
NIASRA at the Australian Statistical Conference 2016
19 December | 2016
NISARA staff members made a significant contribution to the scientific programme at the Australian Statistical Conference organised by the Statistical Society of Australia in Canberra during 5 to 9 December 2016.
Vice Chancellor’s Award for Chris Skinner
16 December | 2016
Chris Skinner, Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), has been successful in obtaining a Vice Chancellor’s Visiting International Scholar Award. This will enable Chris to visit NIASRA from 16 January to 23 March 2017.
J. B. Douglas Awards Day
28 November | 2016
The NSW branch of the Statistical Society of Australia (SSAI) held the 17th Annual J.B. Douglas Awards on Wednesday 23rd November 2016 at UTS.
We are recruiting a Lecturer in Statistics (Level B) position
25 November | 2016
The successful person will carry out teaching, research, governance and community outreach/professional service duties consistent with a Lecturer Level B position. They should have research experience in field(s) of statistics, with priority being given to candidates with research strength in application to real world problems, in particular applications of genomics to plant breeding of relevance to the grains industry. People with research focus is in this area and/or biometrics, with demonstrated potential to collaborate with other research active staff in the Centre for Bioinformatics and Biometrics (CBB) and collaborators of CBB and SMAS are encouraged to apply.
Conference on Privacy in Statistical Databases
1 November | 2016
During 14-16 September 2016, PSD2016 (Privacy in Statistical Databases 2016) conference was held in Dubrovnik, Croatia. During the Conference NIASRA PhD student Yue Ma presented a paper “A New Algorithm for Protecting Aggregate Business Microdata via a Remote System” jointly authored with his supervisor Yan-Xia Lin, and James Chipperfield, John Newman and Victoria Leaver from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
Contemporary Theory and Practice of Survey Sampling: A Celebration of Research Contributions of J. N. K. Rao
1 November | 2016
The Research Institute of Big Data at Yunnan University is pleased to announce that it is hosting a conference celebrating Professor Rao's research contributions. The conference will feature talks by some of the most prominent researchers from the world in survey sampling and official statistics, including NIASRA's Ray Chambers.
Changing the way health surveys are conducted in Australia
17 October | 2016
Margo Barr considered ongoing health surveys from a quality perspective in her recently completed PhD undertaken under the supervision of Professor David Steel in NIASRA. Margo found that the diminishing coverage of landline phone frames was affecting the accuracy of the estimates from land-line only phone surveys.
Brian Cullis elected to the International Biometric Society Executive Board
1 September | 2016
Professor Brian Cullis has been elected to the International Biometric Society Executive Board as a Director from the Asia/Australasia area, for a four-year term starting 1 January 2017.
IBS-AR Student Scholarships
29 August | 2016
To help attract enthusiastic and talented students to career paths in biometrics, the International Biometric Society Australasian Region (IBS-AR) offers scholarships for suitably qualified students who intend to undertake a fourth or honours year of study, or a coursework Masters, in statistics, mathematical statistics, bio-statistics, bioinformatics or biometrics.
Professor Noel Cressie will be delivering the Barnett Lecture at RSS 2016 this September
19 April | 2016
Distinguished Professor Noel Cressie will be delivering the Barnett Lecture at the RSS 2016 Conference in Manchester this September. The Barnett Award this year was awarded to Professor Cressie in recognition of his work advancing fundamental methodology and his applications of statistical methods to address a diverse array of issues in the environmental sciences.
Dr Emi Tanaka will be giving a talk at University of NSW, 13th May 2016
19 April | 2016
Dr Emi Tanaka from CBB, NIASRA will be giving a talk on "Analysis of crop breeding trials using linear mixed models" at the Statistics Seminar series at School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of NSW on Friday 13th May 2016.
Australasian Applied Statistics Conference 2016
19 April | 2016
The Australasian Applied Statistics Conference is an excellent opportunity to liaise with fellow statisticians within the agricultural, biological and environmental sciences and to keep abreast of the most recent developments in statistics within this context.
Wilcoxon Award for Best Applications Paper
18 March | 2016
The paper “Spatio-Temporal Data Fusion for Very Large Remote Sensing Datasets” by Hai Nguyen, Matthias Katzfuss, Noel Cressie & Amy Braverman received the 2015 Wilcoxon Award for best practical application paper appearing the 2014 issues of Technometrics.
NIASRA academic elected as president of Statistical Society of Australia Canberra branch
24 February | 2016
Robert Clark is halfway through a two-year term as President of the Canberra Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia (SSAI). The Society exists to further the study, application and good practice of statistical theory and methods in all branches of learning and enterprise.
Associate Professor Robert Clark of NIASRA invited to Environmental Statistics Symposium in Tokyo
24 February | 2016
The Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM) is a national research institute focussing on the theory and applications of statistics and data science. The Institute is located in Tachikawa, Tokyo.
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