The Department of Statistics would like to congratulate Dr Elke Thonnes on her Warwick Teaching Excellent Award (WATE) Commendation. WATE recognize members of staff who have made a difference in learning and teaching and are awarded by a panel of judges drawn from across the University and chaired by Christina Hughes, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning).

Elke, who is also a foundation fellow of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy, is an enthusiastic and energetic educator who is as active behind the scenes as she is in front of a class. As a WATE commendee she will be sharing her practice and experience with a wider audience through a range of follow up events and sessions over the course of the forthcoming academic year.

More information on WATE including a full list of this year’s winners and commendees can be found here.

Many congratulations to Christiane Görgen upon winning a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduates Who Teach (WATE PGR). The WATE PGR programme seeks to recognise the best teachers from Warwick's postgraduate community, and Christiane exemplifies the dedication and talent that our postgraduate tutors bring to transforming the student experience at Warwick.

A link to the WATE PGR webpage, which includes a full list of this year's winners as well as a statement on Christiane's achievements, can be found here.

Professor Jane Hutton has been named as the winner of the Rob Kempton Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Development of Biometry in the Developing World. Jane will receive her award at a ceremony to be held by the International Biometric Society on Tuesday 12 July.

Further details can be found on the International Biometric Society website.

Many congratulations to Bärbel Finkenstädt Rand who has been promoted to Professor with effect from 1st June 2016. It is a very well-deserved recognition of all her hard work over the years, and as a department we are truly delighted that this has now been approved.

David Selby, a first Year PhD student in the Department of Statistics, has won first prize in the Anvil Hack II event.

Anvil Hack II is a 24-hour "creative" hackathon run by Major League Hacking, which also organised the WarwickHACK event hosted by the engineering department in February. Anvil Hack II was hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London on 7–8 May.

David formed a two-man team with Angus Scott, a friend from the University of Edinburgh. Rather than generate data from music, they set about generating music from data. Inspired by Leland Wilkinson's book The Grammar of Graphics, "Grammarphone" is a web application that maps values in data to the frequency and volume of music, allowing you to listen to your data.

Judging criteria for Anvil Hack II were "creativity" and "fun". There were also prizes from the event's various sponsors (e.g. a GitHub prize for best developer tool and an Amazon prize for best project using Amazon Web Services) as well as an overall first, second and third prize. Grammarphone came first and was awarded the Gold Anvil, which is a real (and very heavy!) anvil, painted gold, that they got to take home.

You can try out Grammarphone here. The interface lets you enter a dataset, which Grammarphone will simultaneously visualise with a line graph and "sonify" with an audio graph. You can pick your own artist and track, or the application can randomly select one from Spotify for you.