may June 8 be the ides of May!

London calling

London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go it alone
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out and draw another breath
London calling and I don’t want to shout

The Clash, 1979

Gregynog [jatp]

learning and inference for medical discovery in Oxford [postdoc]

[Here is a call for a two-year postdoc in Oxford sent to me by Arnaud Doucet. For those worried about moving to Britain, I think that, given the current pace—or lack thereof—of the negotiations with the EU, it is very likely that Britain will not have Brexited two years from now.]

Numerous medical problems ranging from screening to diagnosis to treatment of chronic diseases to  management of care in hospitals requires the development of novel statistical models and methods. These models and methods need to address the unique characteristics of medical data such as sampling bias, heterogeneity, non-stationarity, informative censoring etc. Existing state-of-the-art machine learning and statistics techniques often fail to exploit those characteristics. Additionally, the focus needs to be on probabilistic models which are
interpretable by the clinicians so that the inference results can be integrated within the medical-decision making.

We have access to unique datasets for clinical deterioration of patients in the hospital, for cancer screening, and for treatment of chronic diseases. Preliminary work has been tested and implemented at UCLA Medical Center, resulting in significantly management care in this hospital.

The successful applicant will be expected to develop new probabilistic models and learning methods inspired by these applications. The focus will be primarily on methodological and theoretical developments, and involve collaborating with Oxford researchers in machine learning, computational statistics and medicine to bring these developments to practice.

The post-doctoral researcher will be jointly supervised by Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar and Prof. Arnaud Doucet. Both of them have a strong track-record in advising PhD students and post-doctoral researchers who subsequently became successful academics in statistics, engineering sciences, computer science and economics. The position is for 2 years.

Suffrage Science awards in maths and computing

On October 11, at Bletchley Park, the Suffrage Science awards in mathematics and computer sciences were awarded for the first time to 12 senior female researchers. Among whom three statisticians, Professor Christl Donnelly from Imperial College London, my colleague at Warwick, Jane Hutton, and my friend and co-author, Sylvia Richardson, from MRC, Cambridge University. This initiative was started by the Medical Research Council in 2011 by Suffrage Science awards for life sciences, followed in 2013 by one for engineering and physics, and this year for maths and computing. The name of the award aims to connect with the Suffragette movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, which were particularly active in Britain. One peculiar aspect of this award is that the recipients are given pieces of jewellery, created for each field, pieces that they will themselves give two years later to a new recipient of their choice, and so on in an infinite regress! (Which suggests a related puzzle, namely to figure out how many years it should take until all female scientists have received the award. But since the number increases as the square of the number of years, this is not going to happen unless the field proves particularly hostile to women scientists!) This jewellery award also relates to the history of the Suffragette movement since the WPSU commissioned their own jewellery awards. A clever additional touch was that the awards were delivered on Ada Lovelace Day, October 11.

Only in Britain…

A recent announcement on the University of Warwick official website:

Today the Minister for the Constitution, Chris Skidmore, presented WMG, at the University of Warwick, with a Royal Warrant signed by Her Majesty the Queen, officially conferring her Majesty’s recognition with the title of the Regius Professor of Manufacturing (Engineering).

The title of Regius Professorship is a rare and prestigious award given by Her Majesty the Queen to recognise exceptionally high quality research at an institution. The University of Warwick was one of 12 universities honoured to mark Her Majesty’s 90th Birthday. Previous to this, only 14 had been granted since the reign of Queen Victoria. It is believed that the first Regius Professorship was conferred to Aberdeen University in 1497 by King James IV.

the travelling politician problem