News

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.

Professor Christian Robert has been nominated as a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France for the period 2016-2021 [link: http://www.iufrance.fr/nos-actualites.html]. This national institute supports professors and lecturers from French universities towards a lighter teaching load and dedicated research grants, with the goals of fostering research excellence within French universities, reducing gender inequalities in research, and supporting research throughout the country. Professor Robert was earlier a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France for the period 2010-2015, this is thus his second (and last) nomination.

Dr Martine Barons was recently interviewed by Womanthology magazine on the subject of breaking down barriers for women in the fields of Mathematics and Statistics.

You can read the interview by following this link.

Dr Martine Barons yesterday represented the Warwick Statistics department at a gathering of 10 of the UK’s top experts in pollinators and ran a structured elicitation workshop to estimate quantities that are not available from experiments to use as data in a decision support system based on the recently submitted work by Martine, Professor Jim Smith and Dr Manuele Leonelli on combining expert judgements coherently for decision support.

The elicitation was run by our visitor from Melbourne University, Dr Anca Hanea, using the IDEA protocol on which she is an author and is about to appear in the International Journal of forecasting. That paper shows that by following the IDEA protocol, you can use the data elicited as experts in place of ‘hard data’ from experiments. The quantities elicited yesterday are not available anywhere because the experiments you would need to do in order to get that data would be enormously difficult and expensive.

The gathering was reported on by the BBC for both television and radio. The televised news item can be viewed until 6pm on Thursday 7th April by following the link below (the news item starts at 16.49 minutes into the programme):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b075tzg3/midlands-today-06042016 

Many congratulations to Saul Jacka for winning the “Outstanding Contribution” award, to Chris Veal (joint with Maths) for winning the “Unsung Hero” award and to Jane Hutton who was highly commended for “Public Engagement”.

As Professor Saul Jacka commentated at the celebratory gala dinner held on Friday 11 March, "I think it’s really vital to get people involved in the wider community and one of the ways to do that is to recognise effort and achievement – and the Awards a very good way to recognise that. It’s a very pleasant experience to work for such a friendly institution and this is one way of encouraging that friendliness."

This is a wonderful recognition for their many important contributions to the Department and the University, and it is truly exceptional that three of our colleagues were selected from among the more than 350 nominations made across the University.

More information can be found at:

 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/insite/staff_awards/win2016

Once again, very well done to Saul, Jane and Chris! They very much deserve these plaudits.