January


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The Official Newsletter of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association
January 2018
In This Issue
Upcoming Events:
  • February 14 Luncheon: speaker details coming soon.
  •  CCASA Annual Conference on Pi Day (Wednesday, March 14): save the date. Theme is weather/climate and predictions; more details coming soon.
President's Letter

 
I would imagine that quite a few folks in the statistics community enjoy the game of chess, and if you are a fan, you may have heard about the rather "interesting" choice of logo that was announced for the 2018 World Chess Championship. It sparked a series of memes in the twitterverse, each expressing a clever opinion about the rather peculiar choice of logo. Whether the design was to spark controversy, it certainly brought a broader interest to the 2018 World Chess Championship. It is without a doubt that a logo plays a huge role in creating an image of a brand or organization. The national ASA logo accompanied by a normal distribution gives a sense tha
t the organization involves data. 
The JSM 2018 logo with the Douglas fir replacing the number 1 is a brilliant way to show that the Joint Statistical Meetings 2018 will meet in the beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia, a natural habitat of diverse evergreens.
         
The logo of the Chicago ASA is simple and succinct with the abbreviation of ASA written in three corners of the square with the letters CCASA on the bottom.
It is a clean and simple design, but it falls short in displaying the impact that the Chicago statistics community plays in this world. To make this as organic as possible, I would love to see entries of a new Chicago ASA logo from you. Dust off the colored pencils in your drawers and show us your artistic work. I can't wait to see your creative ideas.
   
Respectfully yours,
Kwang-Youn Kim, PhD 
News from the CCASA Board
See here for the latest on 
News from the World of Statistics.
 
Two interesting links for the New Year from the New York Times. The first looks at a project that used car images in Google Images to predict things about
neighborhoods, while the second looks at Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the topic of a recent CCASA Luncheon talk.
If you are interested in volunteering, please contact us!  Also, if you have news or events that you would like to share or are interested in speaking at a luncheon, please contact us at chicagochapterasa@gmail.com.