SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES

April 28,2011 Graduate Student Research Day at the Fields Institute (map to Fields) Organizing Committee:		Department of Statistics, University of Toronto
Ramya Thinniyam, Co-chair Josh Touyz, Co-chair Zeynep Baskurt Avideh Sabeti	Azadeh Tanha Xufei Li Keith Knight Nancy Reid

Overview:

Statistics Graduate Student Research Day is an annual student initiative supported by the Department of Statistics, University of Toronto and Statistics Graduate Student Union.
This year's theme is Computationally Intensive Problems in Statistics. The day will explore some of these methods and how statistics coupled with computers facilitates the process of decision making, inference, prediction, and pattern recognition.

Keynote speakers:

Diane Lambert, Google New York
Robert Gentleman, Genentech
Joanna Mills Flemming, Dalhousie University

The panelists will include the three keynote speakers above as well as Robert Tibshirani, Stanford University.

Student Speakers:

Alexander Shestopaloff, Department of Statistics
Chunyi Wang, Department of Statistics
Billy Chang , Biostatistics, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Ilya Sutskever, Department of Computer Science

Schedule:

MORNING AGENDA
8:30 a.m.	On-site Registration and Breakfast
9:00 a.m.	Welcome Address: (Topics) Dr. James Stafford (Professor & Statistics Chair), Ramya Thinniyam (PhD Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day), Josh Touyz (MSc. Student & Co-chair of Research Day)
9:15 a.m.	KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Joanna Mills Flemming (Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dalhousie University) Challenges in Marine Statistical Ecology - From Sea Cucumbers to Grey Seals (audio and slides)
10:20 a.m.	Chunyi Wang (PhD Candidate, Department of Statistics, University of Toronto) Approximating the Likelihood for the Hyper-parameters in Gaussian Process Regression
10:40 a.m.	Coffee Break & Poster Presentations
11:00 a.m.	KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Robert Gentleman (Senior Director, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Genentech) Computationally Intensive Biology Problems (audio of talk)
AFTERNOON AGENDA
12:05 p.m.	Ilya Sutskever (PhD Candidate, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto) Generating Text with Recurrent Neural Networks (presentation)
12:25 p.m.	Lunch (provided)
1:35 p.m.	Alexander Shestopaloff (PhD Candidate, Department of Statistics, University of Toronto) Markov Chain Monte Carlo with Constellations of Points (presentation)
1:55 p.m.	KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr. Diane Lambert (Research Scientist, Google) Statistics at Google Scale
3:00 p.m.	Coffee Break & Poster Presentations
3:20 p.m.	Billy Chang (PhD Candidate, Department of Public Health Science, University of Toronto) Regularization for Nonlinear Dimension Reduction by Subspace Constraint (audio and slides)
3:40 p.m.	Panel Discussion Drs. Joanna Mills Flemming, Robert Gentleman, Diane Lambert, and Robert Tibshirani
4:45 p.m.	Closing Remarks Dr. James Stafford (Professor & Statistics Chair), Ramya Thinniyam (PhD Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day), Josh Touyz (MSc. Student & Co-chair of Research Day)

Final List of Participants:

Full Name	University/Affiliation
Alzahrani, Alya	McMaster University
Asher, Matt	University of Toronto
Balon, Jon	University of Toronto, Scarborough
Baskurt, Zeynep	University of Toronto
Brown, Patrick	Cancer Care Ontario
Burkett, Craig	University of Toronto
Chang, Billy	University of Toronto
Cheung, Chi Ho	Brock University
Chong, Yuxiang	University of Toronto
Derkach, Andriy	University of Toronto
Evans, Mike	University of Toronto
Fajardo, Andrei	University of Waterloo
Feuerverger, Andrey	University of Toronto
Finistauri, Michaelangelo	Capital One
Firka, Daniel	University of Toronto
Gentleman, Robert	Genentech
Gibbs, Alison	University of Toronto
Hoang, Uyen	University of Toronto
Khoshraftar, Shima	University of Toronto
Kim, Jisun	University of Toronto
Knight, Keith	University of Toronto
Koudstaal, Mark	University of Toronto
Krakovna, Victoria	University of Toronto
Lambert, Diane	Google New York
Lei, Edwin	University of Toronto
Lei, Na	University of Western Ontario
Li, Lennon	University of Toronto
Li, Li	University of Toronto
Li, Xufei	University of Toronto
Lin, Wei	University of Toronto
Liu, Zhong	Capital One
Mahdi, Esam	University of Western Ontario
McLeod, Ian A.	University of Western Ontario
Mills-Flemming, Joanna	Dalhousie University
Moshonov, Hadas	University of Toronto
Neal, Radford	University of Toronto
Nguyen, Paul	University of Toronto
Reid, Nancy	University of Toronto
Ricci, Jason	University of Toronto
Rosenthal, Jeffrey	University of Toronto
Sabeti, Avideh	University of Toronto
Sheng, Susan Zhe	University of Western Ontario
Shestopaloff, Alexander	University of Toronto
Shi, Jingchunzi	University of Toronto
Shum, Marco	University of Western Ontario
Singer, Basil	University of Waterloo
Smith, Gerald	University of Toronto
Stafford, James	University of Toronto
Sutskever, Ilya	University of Toronto
Tanha, Azadeh	University of Toronto
Thinniyam, Ramya	University of Toronto
Tibshirani, Robert	Stanford University
Tilahun, Gelila	University of Toronto
Touyz, Josh	University of Toronto
Waddell, Adrian	University of Waterloo
Wang, Chunyi	University of Toronto
Wang, Xin	University of Toronto
Wen, Yuting	University of Waterloo
Wilson, Shane	The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Wolters, Mark	University of Western Ontario
Wong, Andy Kin On	McMaster University
Wong, Monica	University of Guelph
Wu, Panpan	University of Toronto
Xia, Anita	University of Toronto
Xu, Lizhen
Xu, Ximing	University of Toronto
Xue, Kaijie	University of Toronto
Yang, Kai	University of Toronto
Yao, Fang	University of Toronto
Yin, Robin	University of Toronto
Zaidi, Ali-Kazim	University of Toronto
Zhang, Fan	University of Toronto
Zhang, Yidan	University of Toronto at Scarborough
Zhou, Zhou	University of Toronto