We are happy to announce the 75th (2023) Annual General Meeting (AGM), to be followed by the Lancaster Lecture given by Professor Samuel Muller, will be held on March 16th at the University of Sydney. We hope to see you all there.

The materials for the AGM will be progressively added to this Dropbox folder. 

Any questions, please feel free to contact: secretary.nswbranch@statsoc.org.au.

Date:  Thursday, 16th March 2023
Time:
5:00pm - 5:30pm: Refreshments
5:30pm - 6:30pm: AGM
6:30pm - 7:30pm: Lancaster Lecture
7:30pm onwards: Dinner (at a nearby restaurant). Please RSVP for dinner to attend. 

Venue: F10A.01.101.Law Building Annex.Law Annex Lecture Theatre 101, The University of Sydney or via zoom.

RSVP: Please use the register via SSA NSW: 2023 AGM + Lancaster Lecture if you are attending in person. Please register here if you would like to attend online to receive zoom link and details.

Lancaster Lecture

Title : Ctrl-Alt-Delete & Repeat: Learning more from Complex Data

Speaker: Professor Samuel Muller

In this lecture, motivated by popular work from Henry Oliver Lancaster from the 1950s, we will explore how we can learn more from complex data. A premise is that all data are more complex than what they may seem to be at first sight: no matter their shape and structure, modality and messiness, their correlation and cohesion.

We will synthesize from work in the last fifteen years and in particular comment on how to build better classifiers to understand what predicts cancer events by deleting part of the data, how to control the properties of the variables we select by using regularization strategies, how repeatedly learning from slightly altered data allows us to understand a little more about the data we want to analyse.

We will also reflect on the state of the art of model selection, a field of research that is very active with hundreds of new theoretical mathematics high quality publications, thousands of papers that are in related fields such as computer and information sciences, as well as tens of thousands of generalist work that is published every year.

Samuel Muller is a Professor of Statistics and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association with expertise in variable selection and inference for statistically challenging data. He is the inaugural Head of School in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and a Theory and Methods Editor for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics. He just completed serving a full term on the Australian Research Council College of Experts. Following his PhD at the University of Bern in 2002, he has had academic appointments at the Australian National University (2003-2004), University of Bern (2004-2006), University of Western Australia (2006-2007) as well as close to 13 years at the University of Sydney until 2020 including as an Associate Dean of Research Education from 2016-2019 and Interim Head of School 2019-2020.