congrats!

Two items of news that reached my mailbox at about the same time: my friends and CMU coauthors Rebecca (Beka) Steorts and Steve Fienberg both received a major award in the past few days. Congrats to both of them!!! At JSM 2015, Steve got the 2015 Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research “for a remarkable career devoted to the development and application of statistical methodology to solve problems for the benefit of society, including aspects of human rights, privacy and confidentiality, forensics, survey and census-taking, and more; and for exceptional leadership in a variety of professional and governmental organizations, including in the founding of NISS.” The Award is delivered by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) in honour of Jerry Sacks. And Beka has been selected as one of the 35 innovators under 35 for 2015, a list published yearly by the MIT Technology Review. In particular for her record-linkage work on estimating the number of casualties in the Syrian civil war. (Which led the Review to classify her as a humanitarian rather than a visionary, which list includes two other machine learners.) Great!