Successful statistics conference for Victoria
Staff and students were awarded numerous accolades as hosts of the 2014 New Zealand Statistical Association conference last month.
The numbers are in—Victoria University staff and students were awarded numerous accolades as hosts and as researchers of the 2014 New Zealand Statistical Association (NZSA) conference last month.
Professor Shirley Pledger, from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, received the Campbell Award—the NZSA’s highest accolade—for her sustained contribution to the promotion and development of statistics.
Professor Pledger is an international expert in estimating animal populations, with her statistical techniques forming part of a US computer package used to survey animal numbers.
In addition, Victoria students Daniel Fernandez and Roy Costilla took top honours in the Student Presentation section sponsored by Harmonic Analytics, where they repeated their winning form from 2013.
Daniel won joint first prize for best student talk for his presentation titled ‘Reversible-jump MCMC for likelihood-based finite mixture models for ordinal data’, whilst Roy took first place for his poster ‘Cluster analysis of repeated ordinal data: a Bayesian hierarchical approach to estimate finite mixtures’.
Hosted by Victoria University from 23-26 November, the annual conference was held in conjunction with the Operations Research Society of New Zealand (ORSNZ) conference.
The joint conference had over 180 attendees with 130 presentations, and included a meeting of the New Zealand Analytics Forum, a panel session on Smart Cities that focussed on the rebuild of Christchurch, four contributed special sessions and five plenary presentations, all of which were delivered by visiting international speakers.
Dr John Haywood, conference chair and Senior Lecturer in Statistics at Victoria, says the conference was a success for Victoria.
“We are grateful to the generous support from various sponsors and the hard work from the conference committee to successfully run this fantastic event”.