Nov 6, 2015 DSI Distinguished Lecture: John Lafferty, University of Chicago

Please join us on Friday, November 6, 2015 at 11 am for a Data Science Initiative Distinguished Lecture with John Lafferty, Professor, Department of Statistics and Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago. The lecture will take place at Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing, 111 Cummington Mall, Room 180. A reception will follow the lecture.

Statistical Learning in High Dimensions

John Lafferty, Professor, Department of Statistics and Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago

Research in multiple communities is leading to new understanding of statistical estimation and prediction in high dimensions, based on rich theory, new computational methods, and complex applications. John Lafferty has been studying a range of nonparametric models and methods that can be useful for high dimensional data. In many cases, variants of nonparametric additive models can be been developed that incur little loss in statistical or computational efficiency over parametric approaches, while making weaker assumptions. Example settings include sparse additive models, graphical models that relax the usual Gaussian assumptions, nonparametric reduced rank models, and variable selection under shape constraints. Lafferty will give an overview of these developments, highlighting some of the gaps in our current understanding, and promising future directions.

About the Speaker:
John Lafferty is Louis Block Professor in the Departments of Statistics, Computer Science, and the University of Chicago. He is also an Adjoint Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. His research area is statistical machine learning, with a focus on computational and statistical aspects of nonparametric methods, high-dimensional data, graphical models, and text modeling. Lafferty received his doctoral degree in mathematics from Princeton University, where he was a member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. Prior to joining the University of Chicago in 2011, he was a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University for almost twenty years. He is currently a member of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) of the National Research Council, and co-chaired a National Academies Workshop on “Training Students to Extract Value from Big Data” in 2014. He was a Medallion Lecturer, awarded by the Institute for Mathematical Statistics, at the Joint Statistical Meetings in 2015.

About the DSI Distinguished Lecture Series:  
Launched as part of the Data Science Initiative at the Hariri Institute for Computing, the Distinguished Lecture Series brings prominent scholars to Boston University to share their experiences and perspectives on data science as it is manifested through or enabled by their research. Lectures in this series should be of interest to a broad audience as they are meant to promote the exciting advances in the methodologies that enable big-data-driven research in a multitude of disciplines.