2018

John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award

This year we had 12 entries. The award is shared by two winners.

- Dustin Tran (Department of Computer Science, Columbia University) for edward (http://edwardlib.org), a Python package for probabilistic modeling, inference, and criticism.

- Nan Xiao (School of Mathematics and Statistics, Central South University, China) for liftr (https://liftr.me), an R package for persistent reproducible reporting.

Student Paper Awards

This year we had a great competition with 25 submissions. The committee selected four winners and one honorable mention. 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)

The Chambers Award review committee consists of Patrick Breheny (chair), Deepayan Sarkar, and Yihui Xie. The Student Paper Award review committee consists of Heike Hofmann, Daniel Sussman, Raymond Wong, and Hao Helen Zhang (chair). We thank the reviewers for their hard work in evaluating the submissions during the holiday season. The winners will present their works in a topic-contributed session at JSM 2018.

Congratulations to all the award recipients.