ASA Connect

Dear Colleagues:

I'm sending you the last reminder for the upcoming event organized and hosted by Boston Chapter of ASA: 2023 Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award Reception

Honoree and Speaker: Nicholas J. Horton, Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society (Statistics and Data Science) at Amherst College

Date: Monday, Oct 30, 2023, 6:00 - 8:00pm (EDT)

Location: Science Center Rm 316, Harvard Statistics Department, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA 02138. 

Note: This reception is a collaboration with the Harvard Statistics Department.

Please register by the end of tomorrow, Oct. 26.

Registration

Presentation Title: From the Federalist papers to ChatGPT

Description: 60 years ago, Fred Mosteller and David Wallace published a paper in JASA that made inferences in an important authorship problem: the Federalist papers. Notwithstanding this groundbreaking work, text continues to be an important example of unstructured data that has traditionally been nearly absent from the statistics curriculum in secondary schools and early post-secondary education, despite the importance that the written word has in all aspects of education and society. In this talk, Dr. Horton will review Mosteller's work and legacy, describe a more modern classification problem, discuss how new learners approached text analytics, and conclude with some thoughts about statistics and data science amidst the advent of powerful generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Bard.

Speaker Bio: Nicholas J. Horton, Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society (Statistics and Data Science) at Amherst College has been selected as the recipient of the 2023 Mosteller Statistician of the Year award by the Boston Chapter. This award honors individuals from academia, industry, and government who have made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and who have shown outstanding service to the statistical community, including the Boston Chapter.

Dr. Horton is recognized for his numerous innovative contributions to statistics and data science education. He has written multiple books and papers in the fields of statistics and data science education and missing data. He is one of the authors of the revised GAISE College guidelines. He is a Vice President of the American Statistical Association and co-chair of the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. He has previously served on the ASA Council of Chapters and Council of Sections and chaired the Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistics working group, ASA's Section on Statistics and Data Science Education, the ASA/NCTM K-12 Joint Committee, and the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). He was elected an ASA Fellow in 2012, a Fellow of the AAAS in 2018 and received the ASA's Founders Award.

About the Award: Every year the Boston Chapter presents the Mosteller Statistician of the Year award to a distinguished statistician who has made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and has shown outstanding service to the statistical community. A list of the past award winners can be found at https://community.amstatorg/bostonchapter/awards/mostellerstatistician