Recent Events

May 6, 2019: ASA President Karen Kafadar spoke on The Critical Role of Statistics in Evaluating Forensic Evidence at Harvard University’s Science Center. Dr. Kafadar introduced us to issues in using statistics in forensic sciences, in particular  highlighting forensic DNA, the assessment of bullet lead evidence, the US anthrax invesitations and the reliability of eyewitness identification. In some cases, patterns typically used as signals in forensic evidence have not proved as reliable as initially thought. Dr. Kafadar urged statisticians to play a role in improving the evaluation of forensic evidence, data that will ultimately be used as evidence in the criminal justice system.

May 3, 2019: BCASA Third Annual Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium took place at Pfizer’s building in Cambridge Massachusetts. Nearly 100 statisticians gathered to discuss statistical methodological research and its applications to biotech and pharmaceutical industry, and to develop connections. The participants had a wide variety of backgrounds, representing industry and academia, senior investigators, students and postdocs, and many were first-time attendees of BCASA events. More information regarding the speakers, and the slides of the presentations, are available here.

March 7, 2019: Mosteller Statistician of the Year Awards Dinner was held at Simmons. The honoree and speaker was Professor Constantine Gatsonis, Department of Biostatistics and Center for Statistical Sciences, Brown University. The title of the presentation was “Radiomic markers for diagnosis and prediction: Promise and hype”. If you missed the event, please see photos here. 

January 19, 2019: Winter Potluck Dinner and Party held at the Springhouse retirement community in Boston. This event was hosted by Judy and Herman Chernoff, one of the chapter's star members,  along with their daughter Miriam and son-in-law Stan Morse. This was a joyous event and the attendance was good in spite of the fact that a big winter storm was predicted for that evening. Many thanks to the hosts and to all who attended!   Rather than cancelling the event all together, the starting time was pushed forward from 6:30 pm to 5:30 pm and the ending time from 9 pm to 8 pm.  Joe Blitzstein, the chapter’s new president made his second scheduled appearance. A smash hit. Some thirty BCASA members and friends appeared and greatly enjoyed the event. They didn’t forget to bring an excellent potpourri of delicious culinary treats.  Sitting at four round tables while other mingled, members met old friends and made new ones. Everyone appeared to have a great time!  If you missed the event or would like to revisit it, please see photos here.

"Technological advancements in the field of mobile devices and wearable sensors make it possible to deliver treatments anytime and anywhere to users like you and me. Increasingly the delivery of these treatments is triggered by detections/predictions of vulnerability and receptivity. These observations are likely to have been impacted by prior treatments. Furthermore, the treatments are often designed to have an impact on users over a span of time during which subsequent treatments may be provided. Here, we discuss our work on the design of a mobile health smoking cessation study in which the above two challenges arose. This work involves the use of multiple online data analysis algorithms. Online algorithms are used in the detection, for example, of physiological stress. Other algorithms are used to forecast at each vulnerable time, the remaining number of vulnerable times in the day. These algorithms are then inputs into a randomization algorithm that ensures that each user is randomized to each treatment an appropriate number of times per day. We develop the stratified micro-randomized trial which involves not only the randomization algorithm but a precise statement of the meaning of the treatment effects and the primary scientific hypotheses along with primary analyses and sample size calculations. Considerations of causal inference and potential causal bias incurred by inappropriate data analyses play a large role throughout." 

October 19, 2018: Short course titled “The Introduction to the Analysis of Incomplete Data” held at Boston University. The course was organized by the American Statistical Association’s Council of Chapters and offered to the chapter under their Traveling Short Course Program. The course was taught by Dr. Ofer Harel, Professor of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Harel demonstrated that ignoring the missing data problem and/or using ad hoc techniques can have serious consequences on the validity of the analysis. Biased results and inefficient estimates are just some of the risks of incorrectly dealing with incomplete data. The course introduced and compared more principled solutions to the missing data issue, including the use of likelihood methods, the EM algorithm, Bayesian methods, Multiple Imputation, and semi/non-parametric methods. Numerical examples along with software for implementing various methods were discussed throughout the course.

September 25, 2018: Boston Chapter event to celebrate Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching of Statistics. This event was held at Brown University School of Public Health and the awardee was Professor Nick Horton from Amherst College. Professor Horton gave a presentation titled “Introductory Statistics in a World of Data Science: Where We Are and Where We Need to Head”. The talk surveyed introductory statistics and biostatistics courses in an era of data science, and discussed questions regarding the role of computation, how to balance the needs of general education students and future statistics and data science students, the role of the statistical analysis cycle, pathways to support student success, faculty development, and the relationships between high school and college preparation. 

May 16, 2018: “Statistics and Data Science in Nutrition Research”, held at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. The program at this meeting was designed to familiarize the audience with some innovative educational initiatives and some on-going research activities involving statistics and data science in the nutrition program at Tufts University. The program included a presentation on the “Stats Beyond the Basics (SBB)” education initiative by Tania Alarcon, followed by lightning talks on “Forecasting famine and infectious outbreaks” by Anastasia Marshak, Ryan Simpson, and Aishwarya Venkat, and “Visualizing time-referenced data” by Elena Naumova. Since this was the last Chapter meeting for the 2017-18 program year, the election of five new officers for 2019 was also conducted at this event. Thanks to all who attended. And thanks to the Tufts University Student Chapter of the ASA, Tufts Friedman School, and Tufts HNRCA for supporting this event.

May 4, 2018: Second Annual Pharmaceutical Symposium hosted by Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. This was a full-day event organized by the Boston Chapter in collaboration with researchers from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Inc, and Cytel Inc. The program focused on statistical issues and challenges that arise in the Pharma area and featured presentations by well-known biostatisticians from academia as well as industry. The event was well attended by more than 65 statisticians from across many pharmaceutical and biotech companies. All attendees enjoyed the excellent presentations and they are all looking forward to next year's symposium. The Boston Chapters extends its appreciation to Takeda Pharmaceuticals for hosting the event and thanks the organizers as well as the attendees for making the day a great success. 

April 27, 2018: Statistics Symposium to Celebrate the 95th Birthday of Herman Chernoff held at Harvard University on Friday April 27.Professor Chernoff's research contributions extend to areas such as design and sequential analysis, optimization and control, nonparametric methods, large sample theory, and statistical graphics. To celebrate his 95^th birthday and his many professional contributions, a symposium was held in his honor at Harvard University. The symposium was co-sponsored by the Harvard Statistics Department, the Boston Chapter of the ASA, and the newly formed New England Statistics Society (NESS), which originates from the New England Statistical Symposium championed by Professor Chernoff in 1987. The program included presentations by former students, colleagues, and friends of Herman. This was a memorable event honoring a distinguished member and a long-time friend of our Chapter. To watch videos from this event, please click on the following links: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. (contributed by Statistics Department at Harvard University)

February 21, 2018:  Mosteller Statistician of the Year Awards Dinner held at Harvard Medical School. This year's winner was Professor Sharon-Lise Norman who received this award for outstanding literature contributions, mentoring of junior faculty, and dedicated service to the profession.

December 5, 2017: Awards Dinner. A dinner to celebrate the BCASA Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching of Statistics was held at Harvard University on December 5.  Dr. Joseph Blitzstein of Harvard was this year’s recipient. At the event, Dr. Blitzstein's gave a presentation entitled "Storytelling in Statistics", where he demonstrated how probability and statistics can be made interesting and relevant to students through the use of stories and real-life examples.

November 4, 2017: A Fall Social and Mini-Conference was held at University of New Hampshire (UNH) in Durham, NH on Saturday November 4. The event was co-sponsored by the Boston Chapter and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the UNH. The speakers included Tevfik Aktekin, UNH; Beth Ziniti, Applied Geosolutions; Philip Ramsey, UNH; Mia Stephens, JMP, and Ernst Linder, UNH. The Chapter thanks the speakers for their excellent presentations. The Chapter is also grateful to the many attendees who participated in the discussions and helped make the day both fun and productive.

October 13, 2017: Around seventy people attended a Short Course on Applied Longitudinal Analysis held at Boston University on October 13, 2017. The course was offered by the ASA under the Traveling Course program and was organized locally by the Boston Chapter and the BU Student Chapter of the ASA (BUSCASA). The course was taught by Dr. Garrett Fitzmaurice, Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The material was drawn from his bestselling textbook, Applied Longitudinal Analysis, which he co-authored with Nan Laird and Jim Ware. The course provided an excellent introduction to statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data emphasizing the practical aspects of the topic. The presentation included a discussion of linear mixed effects models for continuous responses and extensions of generalized linear mixed models for binary and count data. Numerical examples were used for illustration throughout the course.

September 9, 2017: A one-day Workshop on R and RStudio was held at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester on September 9, 2017. The workshop was given by Professor Nick Horton of Amherst College. A key goal was to introduce the participants to teaching applied statistics courses using computing in an integrated way. Dr. Horton has been using R and RStudio to teach statistics to undergraduates at all levels for the last decade and shared his approach and favorite examples. Topics included workflow in the RStudio environment, providing novices with a powerful set of tools for statistical computing, simple data wrangling, data visualization, and basic statistical inference using R. The approach referred to as "Less Volume, More Creativity" can be facilitated using the mosaic package available in R. The workshop was designed to be accessible to those with little or no experience with R and intended to provide participants with skills, examples, and resources that they can use in their own teaching. The presentation was excellent and well received by the many participants.

May 18, 2017: An evening presentation entitled “Gun Violence Prevention: Data and Statistical Issues” given by Professor David Hemenway from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on May 18 at Bentley University. The speaker noted that the United States has the highest rates of firearm death and injury of any high-income country. However, while data and empirical research have been crucial in many areas of public health, there have been deliberate attempts not to collect data on gun violence, to make collected data inaccessible to researchers, and to limit funds for research. The speaker discussed such data and funding issues, along with the use and misuse of statistics in firearms research.

May 5, 2017: A one-day workshop on the "Design and Monitoring of Adaptive Clinical Trials"  given by Cyrus Mehta and Cytel Inc. at Takeda Pharmaceuticals on May 5. In addition to providing an overview of recent developments and best practices in the area, the workshop included hands-on training for East, the industry standard clinical trial design software tool. The participants learned how to design, monitor and simulate fixed, group sequential and adaptive trials with one arm, two or multiple arms, for binary, continuous or time-to-event endpoints. The presentation also described several other new features in the software.

April 8, 2017: A short course entitled “Introduction to Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data” was held in the Science Center at Harvard University on April 8. The course was given by Dr.  Christopher Wikle, Curator’s Distinguished Professor of Statistics at the University of Missouri, and was brought to us by ASA’s Council of Chapters under its Traveling Short Course Program. This course gave a contemporary presentation of spatio-temporal processes and data analysis, covering visualization and exploratory methods, covariance based models, basis function models, dynamic models, and nonlinear dynamic models. The treatment was excellent and much appreciated by the attendees.  

March 8, 2017: The Mosteller Statistician of the Year Awards banquet held at Simmons College on March 8, 2017. The honoree and speaker was Dr. David Schoenfeld, Professor Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Founding Director of the Biostatistics Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His presentation entitled “The Infrequent Bayesian” was very well received by the large audience.

November 16, 2016: Late afternoon lecture entitled “Technical solutions for practical problems in accounting for risk in Massachusetts’ Medicaid program” was given by Professor Arlene Ash from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. This event was held at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

November 11, 2016:  A short course on “The Statistical Analysis of Network Data” held at Boston University on November 11, 2016. The short course was given by Professor Eric Kolaczyk from Boston University. The course was organized into roughly two halves of equal length. Topics for the first half  included manipulation, visualization, and descriptive analysis of network data. The second half included topics pertaining to statistical modeling and inference in network analysis. The examples presented in the course were drawn from a variety of domain areas, with emphasis on computational biology and neuroscience and on social networks. 

October 18, 2016:  A late afternoon lecture on “Understanding P-Values and the Controversy Surrounding Them” was given by Jessica Utts, ASA President at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on October 18. Her presentation focused on ASA’s “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values” which provides six principles for the proper use and interpretation of p-values and statistical significance.

October 12, 2016:  A BCASA evening lecture entitled “Adventures in Music Analytics” was given by Professor Dominique Haughton of Bentley University.

May 24, 2016:  A BCASA evening lecture on “Significance roulette, the sampling distribution of the P value, and strategies for tackling the replication”was given by Geoff Cumming, Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. The event, which was held at Brandeis University, also included the election of new chapter officers. The event was well attended and a lively discussion followed Dr. Cumming’s presentation. In case you missed the event, the following two videos were later shared with us by Dr. Cumming: http://tiny.cc/SigRoulette1 and http://tiny.cc/sigRoulette2  

March 23, 2016: An evening event on “The Future of Clinical Trials: A Panel Discussion”, held at the Kendall Square Marriott in Cambridge on March 23, 2016. The panelists included Ralph D’Agostino, Patrick Marquis, Cyrus Mehta, Bob O’Neill, Marc Pfeffer, and David Schoenfeld. The event was moderated by Scott Evans from Harvard School of Public Health. The discussion topics included: personalized medicine, clinical trial master protocols, orphan drug development, adaptive trial designs, optimizing endpoints to meet the trial objectives, and patient reported outcomes.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​