First-year PhD student Christopher Nam has been awarded the "best poster" prize at the RSS Conference in Brighton, for his work on Exact distributions and sequential Monte Carlo for change points.

The registration period for departments making a commitment to use and/or support the PhD-training initiative APTS in 2010-11 has just closed, and the number of APTS Member Institutions has risen again, to 26 (last year it was 24).  Fifteen of those departments will form the first cohort of APTS Underwriting Institutions, having each made a financial commitment that will help APTS to secure facilities at APTS-week hosting universities well in advance.

View the full lists here

The new exit-polling techniques developed for elections in 2001 and 2005 by David Firth (in collaboration with John Curtice of Strathclyde University; see Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 171, 509–539 for the full details) were used again at the General Election held on 6 May 2010.  

Dr Omiros Papaspiliopoulos is to receive the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Bronze for 2010.  Omiros was Assistant Professor in this Department before moving to Pompeu Fabra University in 2008.

The citation mentions Omiros's innovative work on Monte Carlo probabilistic inference for diffusion processes, work which also involved Gareth Roberts and Alex Beskos of this department.  

Many congratulations to Omiros!

The Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick is holding an invitational one-day conference on Friday 8 January, 2010 with the title 'Statistical Inference in Theory and Application'. This is to mark the retirement of Professor John Copas from teaching and administration.  He will remain attached to the department as an active researcher and Honorary Professor.