April 28,2011

Graduate Student Research Day

Organizing Committee:

Ramya Thinniyam, Co-chair
Josh Touyz, Co-chair
Zeynep Baskurt
Avideh Sabeti
Azadeh Tanha
Xufei Li
Keith Knight
Nancy Reid


Overview:

Statistics Graduate Student Research Day is an annual student initiative supported by the Department of Statistics, University of Toronto and Statistics Graduate Student Union.
This year's theme is Computationally Intensive Problems in Statistics. The day will explore some of these methods and how statistics coupled with computers facilitates the process of decision making, inference, prediction, and pattern recognition.

Keynote speakers:

Diane Lambert, Google New York
Robert Gentleman, Genentech
Joanna Mills Flemming, Dalhousie University

The panelists will include the three keynote speakers above as well as Robert Tibshirani, Stanford University.

Student Speakers:

Alexander Shestopaloff, Department of Statistics
Chunyi Wang, Department of Statistics
Billy Chang , Biostatistics, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Ilya Sutskever, Department of Computer Science

Schedule:

MORNING AGENDA
8:30 a.m. On-site Registration and Breakfast
9:00 a.m. Welcome Address: (Topics)
Dr. James Stafford (Professor & Statistics Chair), Ramya Thinniyam (PhD Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day), Josh Touyz (MSc. Student & Co-chair of Research Day)
9:15 a.m. KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Joanna Mills Flemming (Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dalhousie University)
Challenges in Marine Statistical Ecology - From Sea Cucumbers to Grey Seals (audio and slides)
10:20 a.m. Chunyi Wang (PhD Candidate, Department of Statistics, University of Toronto)
Approximating the Likelihood for the Hyper-parameters in Gaussian Process Regression
10:40 a.m. Coffee Break & Poster Presentations
11:00 a.m. KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Robert Gentleman (Senior Director, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Genentech)
Computationally Intensive Biology Problems (audio of talk)
AFTERNOON AGENDA
12:05 p.m. Ilya Sutskever (PhD Candidate, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto)
Generating Text with Recurrent Neural Networks
12:25 p.m. Lunch (provided)
1:35 p.m. Alexander Shestopaloff (PhD Candidate, Department of Statistics, University of Toronto)
Markov Chain Monte Carlo with Constellations of Points
1:55 p.m. KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr. Diane Lambert (Research Scientist, Google)
Statistics at Google Scale
3:00 p.m. Coffee Break & Poster Presentations
3:20 p.m. Billy Chang (PhD Candidate, Department of Public Health Science, University of Toronto)
Regularization for Nonlinear Dimension Reduction by Subspace Constraint (audio and slides)
3:40 p.m. Panel Discussion
Drs. Joanna Mills Flemming, Robert Gentleman, Diane Lambert, and Robert Tibshirani
4:45 p.m. Closing Remarks
Dr. James Stafford (Professor & Statistics Chair), Ramya Thinniyam (PhD Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day), Josh Touyz (MSc. Student & Co-chair of Research Day)