Student Paper Competition

This award is given annually to up to four graduate students working in the area of Statistical Computing or Graphics. The papers submitted to this competition are meant to be largely the work of the student, and hence we require that they be the first author. The paper should involve some aspect of Statistical Computing, which might be original methodological research, a novel application, or a software-related project. Each year, the winners are invited to present their papers at a special contributed session at the Joint Statistical Meetings, and the Section gives them a grant towards their attendance expenses. The competition is open to applicants who are students in the fall of the year prior to the competition.

Future Competitions

The submission form is available here.

The Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics Sections of the ASA are co-sponsoring a student paper competition on the topics of Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics. Students are encouraged to submit a paper in one of these areas, which might be original methodological research, some novel computing or graphical application in statistics, or any other suitable contribution (for example, a software-related project). The selected winners will present their papers in a topic-contributed session at the 2024 Joint Statistical Meetings. The prize carries with it a cash award of $1,000.

Anyone who is a student (graduate or undergraduate) on or after September 1 is eligible to participate. An entry must include an abstract, a 6-page manuscript (including figures, tables, and references; a two-column format is acceptable), blinded versions of the abstract and manuscript (with no author names or other information that easily identifies the authors), a CV, and a letter from a faculty member familiar with the student’s work. The applicant must be the first author of the paper. The faculty letter must include a verification of the applicant’s student status and, in the case of joint authorship, should indicate what fraction of the contribution is attributable to the applicant. We prefer that electronic submissions of papers consist of PDF files. All materials must be in English. Papers submitted with over 6 pages (including figures, tables, and references) WILL BE DISQUALIFIED.

Students may submit papers to no more than two sections and may accept only one section’s award. Students must inform both sections applied to when he or she wins and accepts an award, thereby removing the student from the award competition for the second section.

All application materials MUST BE RECEIVED by 5:00 PM EST, Friday, December 15, 2023. The submission window will be open on December 1, 2023. They will be reviewed by the Student Paper Competition Award committee of the Statistical Computing and Graphics Sections. The selection criteria used by the committee will include innovation and significance of the contribution as well as the professional quality of the manuscript. Award announcements will be made by January 15, 2024.


Frequently Asked Questions

How am I supposed to fit my manuscript into just 6 pages?
We impose a six-page limit to (a) force students to think carefully about their main ideas and express them concisely, and (b) out of consideration for our judges, who are volunteering their time to help out with this competition.

If you are struggling to meet this limit, you may include supplemental results, such as proofs or figures depicting additional simulations or examples, in an Appendix that starts on page 7. The first six pages, however, should be a self-contained paper that the judges can read and understand without having to consult the Appendix.

It is *not* recommended, however, to squeeze a much longer paper into six pages by shrinking the font, margins, and space between lines. This greatly limits the readability of your paper and tends to irritate the judges.

What does the letter from the faculty member need to contain?

Two things:

  • A certification of your student status in the fall term before the competition.
  • If the paper is jointly authored, an indication as to how much is your work.


Winners

2024

The review panel of the Student Paper Award consisted of Haim Bar (Section on Statistical Computing and Section on Statistical Graphics), Lucy D’Agostino McGowan (Section on Statistical Graphics), Susan VanderPlas (Section on Statistical Graphics), Tim Hesterberg (Section on Statistical Computing), and Philip Waggoner (Awards Chair/joint member; committee chair).
The 2024 Student Paper Awards go to:

Jae Choi, University of Texas at Dallas, "Revisiting Link Prediction with the Dowker Complex";

 

Yu Wang, Medical College of Wisconsin, "Rforce: Random Forest for Composite Endpoints";

 

Thomas Sun, Rice University, "Ultra-efficient MCMC for Bayesian longitudinal functional data analysis";

 

Yuhang Lin, Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE), Iowa State University, "A reproducible pipeline for extracting representative signals from wire cuts".

2023

The review panel of the Student Paper Award consisted of Achraf Cohen (Section on Statistical Computing), Lucy D'Agostino McGowan (Section on Statistical Graphics), Linglong Kong (Section on Statistical Computing), Kiegan Rice (Section on Statistical Graphics) and Raymond Wong (both sections; chair of the review panel). The 2023 Student Paper Awards go to:

June Choe, University of Pennsylvania, "Sub-layer modularity in the Grammar of Graphics";

Haoyu Jiang, Duke University, "The Stochastic Proximal Distance Algorithm";

Subrata Pal, Iowa State University, "Fast matrix-free methods for model-based personalized synthetic MR imaging";

Wenjia Wang, University of Pittsburgh, "Accurate and Ultra-efficient P-value Calculation for Higher Criticism Tests".

2022

The review panel of the Student Paper Award consisted of Linglong Kong (Section on Statistical Computing), Israel Almodovar (Section on Statistical Computing), Inyoung Kim (Section on Statistical Graphics), Kiegan Rice (Section on Statistical Graphics), Raymond Wong (both sections; chair of the review panel). The four 2022 Student Paper Awards go to:

Mengyu Li, Renmin University of China, "Core-elements for Least Squares Estimation";

Emily A. Robinson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, "Eye Fitting Straight Lines in the Modern Era";

Abhishek Shetty, University of California, Berkeley, "Distribution Compression in Near-linear Time";

Xinkai Zhou, University of California, Los Angeles, "Bag of Little Bootstraps for Massive and Distributed Longitudinal Data".

2021


The review panel of the Student Paper Award consisted of Israel Almodovar (Section on Statistical Computing), Lucy D'Agostino McGowan (Section on Statistical Computing), Inyoung Kim (Section on Statistical Graphics), Earo Wang (Section on Statistical Graphics), Raymond Wong (both sections; chair of the review panel). The four 2021 Student Paper Awards go to:

  • Gaurav Agarwal, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, "Flexible Quantile Contour Estimation for Multivariate Functional Data: Beyond Convexity";
  • Jiaxin Hu, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "Supervised Tensor Decomposition with Interactive Side Information";
  • Nathan Osborne, Rice University, "Latent Network Estimation and Variable Selection for Compositional Data via Variational EM";
  • Yifan Zhu, Iowa State University, "Three-dimensional Radial Visualization of High-dimensional Datasets with Mixed Features".

The student award recipients will present their work in a topic-contributed session of the 2021 Joint Statistical Meetings. They will also receive their certificate and cash prize at the mixer of the Section on Statistical Computing and the Section on Statistical Graphics.


2020

The review panel of the Student Paper Award consisted of Xiaoyue Zoe Cheng, Jay Emerson, Lucy D'Agostino McGowan, Raymond Wong, and Jun Yan (chair). The four 2020 Student Paper Awards go to:


  • "A Matrix-Free Method for Exploratory Factor Analysis of High-Dimensional Gaussian Data," by Fan Dai, Iowa State University
  • "A Grammar of Graphics Framework for Generalized Parallel Coordinate Plots," by Yawei Ge, Iowa State University
  • "Moving-Resting Process with Measurement Error in Animal Movement Modeling, " by Chaoran Hu, University of Connecticut
  • "End-to-end Statistical Learning, with or without Labels," by Corinne Jones, University of Washington

The student award recipients will present their work in a topic-contributed session; they will also receive their certificate and cash prize at the mixer of the Section on Statistical Computing and the Section on Statistical Graphics at the 2020 JSM in Philadelphia.

2019


The review panel of the Student Paper Award consisted of Xiaoyue Zoe Cheng, Yixuan Qiu, Jon Steingrimsson, and Raymond Wong (chair). The four 2019 Student Paper Awards go to:

  • "Computing High-Dimensional Normal and Student-t Probabilities with Tile-Low-Rank Quasi-Monte Carlo and Block Reordering" by Jian Cao, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology;
  • "Online Decentralized Leverage Score Sampling for Streaming Multidimensional Time Series", by Rui Xie, Department of Statistics, University of Georgia;
  • "Plotting Likelihood-Ratio Based Confidence Regions for Two-Parameter Univariate Probability Models with the R conf Package", by Christopher Weld, Department of Applied Science, College of William & Mary;
  • "Vecchia-Laplace approximations of generalized Gaussian processes for big non-Gaussian spatial data", by Daniel Zilber, Department of Statistics, Texas AM University.

The student winners will present their work in a topic-contributed session; they will also receive their certificate and cash prize at the mixer of the Section on Statistical Computing and the Section on Statistical Graphics at the 2019 JSM in Denver.

Congratulations to all the award recipients for their impressive work!



2018


This year we had a great competition with 25 submissions. The committee selected four winners and one honorable mention. Thank you to our judges for all their hard work in reading and evaluating these papers: Heike Hofmann, Daniel Sussman, Raymond Wong, and Hao Helen Zhang (chair). The four winners are:

  • "BRISC: Bootstrap for rapid inference on spatial covariances", by Arkajyoti Saha (Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University)
  • "MM algorithms for variance component models", by Liuyi Hu (Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University).
  • "An asympirical smoothing parameters selection approach for SS-ANOVA models in large samples", by Xiaoxiao Sun (Department of Statistics, University of Georgia)
  • "Calendar-based graphics for visualizing people's daily schedules", by Earo Wang (Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, Monash University)

The honorable mention is

  • "Dependency diagnostic: visually understanding pairwise variable relations", by Kevin Lin (Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University)

2017

We had a great competition this year with 27 submissions. Thank you to our judges for all their hard work in reading and evaluating these papers: Robert Gramacy, Kenneth Shirley, Kate Cowles, and Deepayan Sarkar. This year’s winners are:

  • “acc: An R package to process, visualize, and analyze accelerometer data”, by Jae Joon Song (University of Texas)
  • “The biglasso Package: A Memory- and Computation-Efficient Solver For Lasso Model Fitting With Big Data in R”, by Yaohui Zeng (University of Iowa)
  • “Scalable Bayesian Learning for Sparse Logistic Models”, by Xichen Huang (University of Illinois)
  • “The Self-Multiset Sampler”, by Weihong Huang (University of Illinois)

2016

We had a great competition this year with 27 submissions. Thank you to our judges for all their hard work in reading and evaluating these papers: Tim Hesterberg, Di Cook, and Grant Brown. This year's winners are:

  • "A fully Bayesian strategy for high-dimensional hierarchical modeling using massively parallel computing", by Will Landau (Iowa State University)
  • "The picasso Package for Nonconvex Regularized M-estimation in High Dimensions in R", by Xingguo Li (University of Minnesota)
  • "Nonparametric Signal Procession of Space-Time Trajectory Data: Algorithm for Eye Movement Pattern Recognition", by Shinjini Nandi (Temple University)
  • "Using the geomnet Package: Visualizing African Slave Trade, 1514 - 1866", by Samantha Tyner (Iowa State University)

2015

We had a great competition this year with 21 submissions. We would like to acknowledge our judges for their hard work in evaluating these submissions: Hadley Wickham, Jonathan Lane, and Mario Morales. We had two winners from the Graphics Section and two from the Computing Section, as listed below. This year's winners are:

  • Computing: Ben Courtney Stevenson (University of St Andrews, United Kingdom) - An R package for the estimation of animal density from a fixed array of remote detectors
  • Computing: Kaylea Haynes (Lancaster University, Lancaster) - Efficient penalty search for multiple changepoint detection in Big data
  • Graphics: Lindsay Rutter (Iowa State University) - phyViz: Phylogenetic visualization of genealogical information in R
  • Graphics: Eric Hare and Andrea J. Kaplan (Iowa State University) - Introducing statistics with intRo

2014

We had a great competition this year with 22 submissions, 19 in the Computing Section and 3 for the Graphics Section. We would like to acknowledge our judges for their hard work in evaluating these submissions: John Castelloe, Erik Iverson, and Heike Hofmann. We had one winner from the Graphics Section and three winners from the Computing Section, as listed below:

This year's winners are:

  • Computing: Gina Grünhage (Technische Universität Berlin) - Visualizing the Effects of a Changing Distance Using Continuous Embeddings
  • Computing: Geoffrey Thompson (Iowa State University) - An Adaptive Method for Lossy Compression of Big Images
  • Computing: Guan Yu (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) - Sparse Regression Incorporating Graphical Structure Among Predictors
  • Graphics: Susan Vanderplas (Iowa State University) - The Curse of Three Dimensions: Why Your Brain Is Lying to You

2013

The number of submissions this year is better than last year, a total of 28 submissions (18 from last year and only 10 before that). The judges were John Castelloe, Erik Iverson and Michael Lawrence. Many thanks for their efforts to review and rank all the papers so quickly.

This year's winners are:

  • Abbass Sharif, (Utah State University) "Multivariate Visual Data Mining Tools for Functional Actigraphy Data"
  • Adam Loy, (Iowa State University), "Are you Normal, The problem of confounded residual structures in hierarchical models"
  • Nathaniel Helwig, (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), "Fast and stable multiple smoothing parameter selection in smoothing spline analysis of variance models with large samples"
  • Xinxin Shu, (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), "Time-varying networks estimation and dynamic model selection"

2012

The number of submissions this year is better than last year, a total of 18 submissions (10 from last year). The four judges were John Castelloe, Erik Iverson, Mark Greenwood and Michael Lawrence. Many thanks for their efforts to review and rank all the papers so quickly.

This year's winners are:

  • Graphics: Niladri Roy Chowdhury, (Iowa State University), "Where's Waldo: Looking closely at a Lineup"
  • Computing: Yunzhi Lin, (University of Wisconsin), Lasso Tree for Cancer Stage Grouping with Survival Data
  • Computing: Karl Pazdernik, (Iowa State University), Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Fixed Rank Kriging
  • Computing: Jingfei Zhang, (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sampling for Conditional Inference on Network Data

2011

  • Graphics: Mahbubul Majumder (advisors Heike Hofmann and Dianne Cook, Department of Statistics, Iowa State University) "Visual Statistical Inference for Regression Parameters"
  • Computing: Wonyul Lee (advisor Yufeng Liu, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) "Simultaneous Multiple Response Regression and Inverse Covariance Matrix Estimation via Penalized Gaussian Maximum Likelihood"
  • Computing: Yunpeng Zhao (advisors Elizaveta Levina and Ji Zhu, Department of Statistics, University of Michigan) "Community extraction for social networks"

2010

This year a large number of excellent entries were received, from which the selection committee has chosen four winners (in alphabetical order):

  • Han Liu (advisors John Lafferty and Larry Wasserman, Statistics and Machine Learning Program, Carnegie Mellon University)
    "Multivariate Dyadic Regression Trees for Sparse Learning Problems"
  • Hua Ouyang (advisor Alexander Gray, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology) 
    "Fast Stochastic Frank-Wolfe Algorithms for Nonlinear SVMs"
  • Ali Shojaie (advisor George Michailidis, Department of Statistics, University of Michigan) 
    "Discovering Graphical Granger Causality Using the Truncating Lasso Penalty"
  • Ying Sun (advisors Jeff Hart and Marc G. Genton, Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University) 
    "Functional Boxplots for Complex Data Visualization"

The students will be recognized at the Statistical Computing/Statistical Graphics business meeting at JSM 2010. Congratulations to the winners and many thanks to the judges for their hard work in making this year's competition a success!

2009

This year a large number of excellent entries were received, from which the selection committee selected five winners (in alphabetical order):

  • Bjorn Bornkamp (advisors Jose Pinheiro and Katja Ickstadt) 
    "MCPMod: An R Package for the Design and Analysis of Dose-Finding Studies"
  • Wei-Chen Chen (advisor Karin Dorman) 
    "Twisted Sisters: Disentangling Selection in Overlapping Reading Frames"
  • Jian Guo (advisors Elizaveta Levina, George Michailidis and Ji Zhu) 
    "Pairwise Variable Selection for High-dimensional Model-based Clustering"
  • Ruth Hummel (advisor David Hunter) 
    "A Steplength Algorithm for Fitting ERGMs"
  • Mihee Lee (advisors J.S. Marron and Haipeng Shen) 
    "Penalized Sieve Deconvolution Estimation of Mixture Distributions with Boundary Effects"

2008

We are pleased to announce the four winners of this year's Student Paper Competition. There were a total of 18 submissions and the four judges of this year's competition, Juana Sanchez, Linda Pickle, Jane Harvill and Peter Craigmile did an outstanding job of reviewing and ranking all papers in a very short period. Many thanks to them for their efforts and patience.

This year's winners are:

  • Ming-Hung Kao (advisor John Stufken)
    Multi-objective Optimal Experimental Designs for Event-Related fMRI Studies
  • Ernest Kwan (advisor Michael Friendly) 
    Tableplot: A New Display for Factor Analysis
  • Adam Rothman (advisor Liza Levina and Ji Zhu) 
    Sparse Permutation Invariant Covariance Estimation
  • Michael Wu (advisor Xihong Lin) 
    Two-Group Classification Using Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis

The students will be recognized at the Statistical Computing/Statistical Graphics business meeting at JSM 2009. Congratulations to the winners and many thanks to the judges for their hard work in making this year's competition a success!

2007

  • Andrew Finley (advisors Sudipto Banerjee and Alan R. Ek), 
    spBayes: An R Package for Univariate and Multivariate Hierarchical Point-referenced Spatial Models
  • Alexander Pearson (advisor Derick R. Peterson),
    A Flexible Model Selection Algorithm for the Cox Model with High-Dimensional Data
  • Sijian Wang (advisor Ji Zhu), 
    Improved Centroids Estimation for the Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classifier
  • Hadley Wickham (advisors Di Cook and Heike Hofmann), 
    Exploratory Model Analysis

2006

  • Youjuan Li, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (advisor: Ji Zhu)
    Efficient Computation and Variable Selection for the L1-norm Quantile Regression
  • Fan Lu, University of Wisconsin-Madison (advisor: Grace Wahba)
    Kernel Regularization and Dimension Reduction
  • Rebecca Nugent, University of Washington-Seattle (advisor: Werner Stuetzle)
    Clustering with Confidence
  • Philip Reiss, Columbia University (advisor: Todd Ogden)
    An Algorithm for Regression of Scalars on Images

2005

2004

2003

  • Guangzhe Fan, University of Alabama
    Regression Tree Analysis using TARGET
  • Feng Gao, Emory University
    Estimation of Baseline Hazard with Time-Dependent Covariates
  • Alexander Gray, Carnegie Mellon
    Very Fast Multivariate Kernel Density Estimation via Computational Geometry
  • Yufeng Liu, The Ohio State University
    Multicateogry Support Vector Machine and Psi-Learning

2002

  • Subharup Guha, Ohio State
    Benchmark Estimation for Markov Chain Monte Carlo Samples
  • Roger Peng, UCLA
    Estimating the Renewal Distribution of a Spatial-Temporal Process
  • Ronny Vallejos, University of Connecticut
    A Recursive Algorithm to Restore Images Based on Robust Estimation of NSHP Autoregressive Models
  • Ji Zhu, Stanford University
    Kernel Logistic Regression and the Import Vector Machine

2001

  • Roberto Gonzalez, York University, U.K.
    A Panel Data Simultaneous Equation Model with a Dependent Categorical Variable and Selectivity
  • Satoshi Miyata, Ohio State University
    Adaptive Freeknot Splines
  • Rituparna Sen, University of Chicago
    Predicting a Web User's Next Access Based on Log Data
  • Mu Zhu, Stanford University
    Feature Extraction for Non-parametric Discriminant Analysis

2000

  • Heike Hofmann, University of Augsburg
    Generalized Odds Ratios for Visual Modeling
  • Stijn Vansteelandt, University of Ghent
    The Imputation towards Directional Extremes (IDE) Algorithm for Analyzing Sensitiveity to Incomplete Outcomes
    (with E. Goetghebeur)
  • Iain Pardoe, University of Minnesota
    A Bayesian Sampling Approach to Regression Model Checking
  • Peter Karcher, University of California-Santa Barbara
    Generalized Nonparametric Mixed Effects Models
    (with Yuedong Wang)

1999

  • Alexandre Bureau, Dept of Biostatistics, University of California, Berkeley
    An S-PLUS Implementation of Hidden Markov Models in Continuous Time
    (with James P. Hughes and Stephen Shiboski)
  • Ilya Gluhohvsky, Dept. of Statistics, Stanford University
    Image Restoration Using Modifications of Simulated Annealing
  • Peter D. Hoff, Dept of Statistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood Estimation Via Mixtures
  • Muhammad Jalaluddin, Dept of Statistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    An Algorithm for Robust Inference for the Cox Model with Frailties
    (with Michael R. Kosorok)

1998

  • Alessandra Brazzale, Department of Mathematics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
    Approximate Conditional Inference in Logistic and Loglinear Models
  • Matt Calder, Department of Statistics, Colorado State University
    Scompile: A Compiler for SPLUS
  • Steven Scott, Department of Statistics, Harvard University
    Bayesian Analysis of a Two State Markov Modulated Poisson Process
  • Yan Yu, Statistics Center, Cornell University
    Fitting Trees to Curve Data: An Application to Time of Day Patterns of International Calls
    (with Diane Lambert)

1997

  • Wenjiang J. Fu, University of Toronto
    Penalized Regressions: the Bridge versus the Lasso
  • Alan Gous, Stanford University
    Adaptive Estimation of Distributions using Exponential Sub-Families
  • Gareth James, Stanford University
    The Error Coding Method and PaCT's
  • Ramani S. Pilla, Pennsylvania State University
    New Cyclic Data Augmentation Approaches for Accelerating EM in Mixture Problems

1996

  • Dmitrii Danilov, St. Petersburg State University
    Principal Components in Time Series Forecasting
  • Ranjan Maitra, University of Washington
    Estimating Precision in Functional Images
  • Bob Mau, University of Wisconsin, Madison
    Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference via Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
    (with Michael Newton)
  • Chris Volinsky, University of Washington
    Applying Bayesian Model Averaging to Cox Models
    (with David Madigan, Adrian Raftery and Richard Kronmal)

1995

  • Sudeshna Adak, Stanford University
    Tree based Adaptive Estimation of Time-dependent Spectra for Nonstationary Processes
  • John Gavin, University of Bath
    Subpixel Reconstruction in Image Analysis
    (with Christopher Jennison)
  • William Lu, University of California, Berkeley
    The Expectation-Smoothing Approach for Indirect Curve Estimation
  • Yingnian Wu, Harvard University
    Random Shuffling a New Approach to Match Making