America's Safest Cities -- weather wise

In this age of extreme weather, where will you be the safest?

The Hype Cycle

Just heard about this phrase at a workshop. Found it pretty interesting. [Read more on Wikipedia]

The really scary phone

We all sort of know it is hard to keep an entirely private life in today's world. But we have no idea how much of our personal life has been infiltrated until a recent "discovery" of iphone location data.

According to an WSJ article, Apple and Google didn't realize the values in this gigantic pool of data until recently. There is also the recent discovery that social networking and behavioral data can be automatically logged by our cell phones. The use of the data? Better marketing. In a recent article by WSJ, it is pointed out that our phone can actually log our body language during phone calls, the same technology that has made our iphone games more fun. Therefore, statistical methods can (potentially) be applied to study the association between body language and the content of phone calls. A always walks around while calling B, and sits at a desk while calling C. Different social ties, possibly different social influence, and thus different marketing values. Existing research has already achieved a level where  a trained learning method can predict whether two people are discussing politics without actually logging the conversation. This prediction was based on some call history, location, timing of the call, etc.

This seems to suggest a new wave of interesting data, gigantic in size and complex in nature, attractive to both machine/statistical learning researchers and social/behavioral researchers.

PS: Michael Malecki posted the R codes he used to analyze his own iphone data. I can't wait, but yet to find time, to try this on my own iphone data.

Happy 100th Birthday, my dear Tsinghua!

Tsinghua University is celebrating 100 years since it's foundation on 4/24. The beautiful campus of Tsinghua is my dearest hometown.

2011 Minghui Yu Memorial Conference for PhD students and by PhD students

From http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~shawn/MYMC2011

The doctoral students in the Department of Statistics are pleased to announce the 2011 Minghui Yu Memorial Conference on Sunday, April 17th in the Faculty House on the Columbia University main campus. This event is in honor of Minghui Yu, a student in our department who passed away in a tragic accident three years ago.  

The conference will feature talks by students in statistics, ranging from those just beginning a research program to those who are about to defend dissertations. In addition to being an occasion to remember our friend and colleague, this event will be an opportunity to learn about exciting new research areas emerging from our department.  

This year we are pleased to have a keynote presentation by Professor Jianqing Fan from the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. Contact Stephanie Zhang [ssz2105 -at- columbia.edu] for questions about this event.  

Thank you to the Department of Statistics and the Graduate Student Advisory Council for their generous support.