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A novel curved artificial compound eye (CurvACE) has been created. Compared to single-lens eyes, compound eyes offer lower resolution, but significantly larger fields of view, thin package, and with negligible distortion.

Two years ago Stanford professor Andrew Ng joined Google?s X Lab, the research group that?s given us Google Glass and the company?s driverless cars. His mission: to harness Google?s massive data centers and build artificial intelligence systems on an unprecedented scale.

Wired

System understands driver's personal preferences to deliver a more meaningful experience behind the wheel VAN BUREN TOWNSHIP, Mich., May 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Would you like your vehicle to suggest a different route to or from work when there are unexpected delays on your regular course? What if your vehicle's cabin temperature adjusted automatically based on your preferences and the outside temperature?

Engadget

System understands driver's personal preferences to deliver a more meaningful experience behind the wheel VAN BUREN TOWNSHIP, Mich., May 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Would you like your vehicle to suggest a different route to or from work when there are unexpected delays on your regular course? What if your vehicle's cabin temperature adjusted automatically based on your preferences and the outside temperature?

Engadget

At first glance it looks like Phil Wu is just another guy wearing glasses. But take a second look and you realize there's something missing ?

Vancouver Sun

At first glance it looks like Phil Wu is just another guy wearing glasses. But take a second look and you realize there's something missing ?

Vancouver Sun

At first glance it looks like Phil Wu is just another guy wearing glasses. But take a second look and you realize there's something missing ?

Vancouver Sun

For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell.?

The Atlantic

The big players in technology seem to agree that the Internet of Everything (IoE) is a huge transition that will have an impact on many aspects of life, though they still see the shift from their own points of view?not yet with a single coherent vision. That?s the takeaway from the opening panel at the May 16 Techonomy Lab conference on the IoE.

Forbes Technology

D-Wave, the small company that sells the world?s only commercial quantum computer, has just bagged an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. The three organizations have joined forces to install a D-Wave Two, the computer company's latest model, in a facility launched by the collaboration ?

Scientific American

These last couple weeks have been crammed full of more robots than humans like us can reasonably be expected to handle. So, you'll have to forgive us while we wade through massive amounts of incredibly extraordinarily SUPER COOL robot stuff, and you can expect several weeks worth of brand new stuff from ICRA and more.

IEEE Spectrum

INGenIOuS: Strategies for advancing the mathematics and statistics workforce

Deb Nolan writes:
The Institute of Mathematical Statistics has joined the INGenIOuS community (Investing in the Next Generation through Innovative and Outstanding Strategies), along with the American Statistical Association, US National Science Foundation, Mathematical Association of America, American Mathematical Society, and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematicians. INGenIOuS will host a series of online and in-person events to develop strategies for investing in the training of the next generation of undergraduate and graduate students. The aim is to engage the mathematical sciences community in thinking strategically about enhancing recruitment, retention, and job placement in our community. The discussion has been divided into the following six sections (descriptions from the INGenIOuS website):

Recruitment & Retention – Helping to make the mathematical and statistical sciences a vibrant choice for a broad segment of the population (including the issue of broadening participation of women and minorities).

Technology & MOOCs – The expanding role of technology and its uses across STEM fields (the new opportunities it is bringing about in terms of new science; alternate forms of course delivery like MOOCs (massive open online courses) or flipped classrooms, how the introduction of new technology presents new challenges in terms of training).

Internships – Fostering and enhancing internships, co-ops, and industrial training opportunities for students at all levels.

Job Placement – Current best practices for connecting mathematical and statistical sciences students to jobs in all sectors

Measurement & Evaluation – Measures and mechanisms to assess the efficacy of, and return on investment in, the variety of successful training activities that departments are offering. How do we know we know that any particular program made a difference?

Documentation & Dissemination – The documentation and dissemination of effective training practices. How does the community avoid re-inventing the wheel without being too prescriptive?

The IMS would like to encourage its members to add their voice to these important discussions. Your participation is essential to the success of this effort. To be part of this project and to participate in the online discussions and panels please join the INGenIOuS community at www.ingeniousmathstat.org and consider participating in the following opportunities:

• Complete a survey at http://fs24.formsite.com/ingenious/form2/index.html
• Attend an online panel (if you read this in time): Internships (May 1), Job Placement (May 9), Measurement and Evaluation (May 17), Technology and MOOCs (May 30), Documentation & Dissemination (May 31), Recruitment & Retention (June 7).
• Joining a brief online open discussion following each panel.
• Apply to attend the final three-day workshop July 14–16.

For more information on each of these activities, visit http://www.ingeniousmathstat.org/

Featuring news about Peter Hall, Gregory Lawler; Larry Shepp; Gareth Roberts, Terry Speed; Larry Brown, Bin Yu; Eyal Lubetsky; T.N. Sriram; Vincenzo Capasso; Peter Bickel.

 

US National Academy of Sciences elects Peter Hall and Greg Lawler

The US National Academy of Sciences has elected 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Among them are two familiar names: former IMS President Peter Hall, and IMS Fellow Gregory F. Lawler. Peter Hall is Australian Laureate Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Distinguished Professor at UC Davis. He was elected a Foreign Associate. Greg Lawler is professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Chicago. Members are elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. National Academy membership is considered one of the highest American honors that a scientist can receive.

Larry Shepp, 1936–2013

On April 23 Larry Shepp, the Patrick T. Harker Professor in the Statistics Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, passed away at the age of 76, having been unable to recover from a fall several months ago. Larry was loved by many and had friends all over the world. Internationally recognized as a distinguished mathematician and probabilist of the highest caliber, Larry was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A full obituary will follow.

Gareth Roberts and Terry Speed named Fellows of the Royal Society

The UK’s Royal Society is a Fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Each year it elects new Fellows from the UK and Commonwealth, and Foreign Members; they are elected on the basis of excellence in science. There are approximately 1,450 Fellows and Foreign Members, including more than 80 Nobel Laureates. Among those elected this year are Gareth Roberts and Terry Speed. Gareth Roberts, University of Warwick, UK: according to http://royalsociety.org/people/gareth-roberts/ his work spans “applied probability, Bayesian statistics and computational statistics. He has made fundamental contributions to the theory, methodology and application of Markov Chain Monte Carlo and related methods in statistics. He has developed crucial convergence and stability theory, constructed a theory of optimal scaling for Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, and has introduced and explored the theory of adaptive MCMC algorithms. He has made pioneering contributions to infinite dimensional simulation problems and inference in stochastic processes.” Terry Speed is Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. The Royal Society website http://royalsociety.org/people/terence-speed/ says Terry, “is regarded internationally as the expert on the analysis of microarray data. This results partly from the sheer ingenuity of his work, and in part it is due to his commitment to working closely with biomedical scientists, enabling him to appreciate first-hand the biological challenges and the consequent requirements of new methodology … [He] has made seminal contributions to bioinformatics, statistical genetics, the analysis of designed experiments, graphical models and Bayes networks.”

American Academy of Arts and Sciences elects Larry Brown, Bin Yu

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected Larry Brown and Bin Yu to its membership. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.

Lawrence David Brown, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, lists his research interests at http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~lbrown/ as, “statistical decision theory; statistical inference; nonparametric function estimation; foundations of statistics; sampling theory (census data); empirical queueing science.” Bin Yu, Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, is currently IMS President-Elect. According to her department webpage, Bin is “currently working on statistical machine learning theory, methodologies, and algorithms for solving high-dimensional data problems. Current research topics of my group cover sparse modeling (e.g. Lasso), structured sparsity (e.g. hierarchical and group and graph path), analysis and methods for spectral clustering for undirected and directed graphs; and our data problems come from diverse interdisciplinary areas including remote sensing, neuroscience, document summarization, and social networks. My past research areas have also included empirical processes, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, signal processing, the minimum description length principle (MDL), and information theory.”

The complete list of new members is at http://www.amacad.org/news/classlist2013.pdf

Eyal Lubetzky receives Rollo Davidson Prize

The Rollo Davidson Trustees have announced the award of the 2013 Rollo Davidson Prize jointly to Eyal Lubetzky (Microsoft Research, Redmond) and Allan Sly (University of California, Berkeley) for their work on the dynamics of the Ising model, and especially their remarkable proof of the cut-off phenomenon.

New IMS Managing Editor

IMS Council has approved the appointment of T.N. Sriram as Managing Editor, for the term January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2016. He will take over from Michael Phelan. T.N. Sriram is a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia, Athens. See his webpage at http://www.stat.uga.edu/people/faculty/tn-sriram

Vincenzo Capasso awarded “Chair of Excellence”

Vincenzo Capasso, who is a member of IMS and an Elected Fellow of ISI, is Full Professor of Probability and Mathematical Statistics at the Department of Mathematics, Milan University, Italy. He has been awarded one of ten Chairs of Excellence for the 2013–14 academic year, in an international competition called by Carlos III University of Madrid, in order to promote excellence in research and attract frontline researchers from the international university and research community. The awardees in all fields of research were selected by an evaluation committee composed of eight senior professors, including five from Carlos III.

COPSS Fisher Lecture by Peter Bickel

Peter Bickel will give the COPSS Fisher lecture at JSM Montreal on August 7th, at 4pm. The title of his talk is From Fisher to “Big Data”: continuities and discontinuities.

Deadline June 15, 2013

Nominations are sought for the 2013 National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research. The prize recognizes sustained, high-quality cross-disciplinary research involving the statistical sciences. The prize of $1,000 will be presented at the NISS/SAMSI JSM Reception on August 5, 2013, in Montreal.

Further information about the award can be found at www.niss.org/news/awards/jerome-sacks-award-outstanding-cross-disciplinary-research

To nominate an individual, please submit a nomination letter (maximum two pages, including the names of at least two other individuals who have consented to write letters of support) and a CV, to sacksaward2013@niss.org

The Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS) is a nonprofit public benefit corporation registered in California. We have applied for federal tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Section 501(c)(3). FOAS has a worldwide mission to promote free software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics.

Currently, the Journal of Statistical Software is the only FOAS project. JSS has grown rapidly over the 15 years of its existence, in page count, quality, and impact. The journal does not charge fees to authors or to readers. It needs a more stable support structure to guarantee its continued existence and growth.

On the FOAS website you can join, and/or make financial contributions. We invite you to contribute ideas, projects, and materials for the FOAS site.

Jan de Leeuw, email: jan.deleeuw@foastat.org
Katharine Mullen, email: katharine.mullen@foastat.org
Achim Zeileis, email: achim.zeileis@foastat.org

The IMS and other professional societies were asked last year, by the US National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, for input in response to five questions, which were put to members in an email from the IMS President in January.

The IMS members’ responses have now been collated into a report, which is available for download here.