Message from Vipin Arora- 2023 SSPA Chair
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Jacob Bien as the winner of the AISSPA Innovation Award!!
Dr. Jacob Bien is a Dean's Associate Professor in Business Administration in the Department of Data Sciences and Operations at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Bien has made outstanding contributions, including R packages supporting his statistics papers (around 25 R packages). However, what truly distinguishes Dr. Bien from many other statisticians are two major software development projects: "simulator" and "litr" R packages. A common thread between these two R packages is that they are designed to increase the quality of code written by statisticians and to facilitate the process of writing high-quality code. This speaks directly to the three categories considered for the award by the SSPA Award committee (Improvement in software tools for statistical programming and analytics, Methodology to improve the efficiency of statistical programming and analytics and outstanding contributions to the community of statistical programmers and analysts).
In summary, Dr. Bien's contributions have benefited the statistical community and the public in general. On behalf of SSPA, I also want to thank Prof Daniela Witten, Professor, and Dorothy Gilford, Endowed Chair Departments of Statistics & Biostatistics, University of Washington, for taking the time to nominate Dr. Bien!