College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Hogg and Craig Lectures - The 50th Festival featuring Dan Nettleton
Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
Date:
Friday, April 28, 2023 - 12:00am to Saturday, April 29, 2023 - 11:45pm
Join us as we celebrate our
Hogg and Craig Lectures - The 50th Festival
April 28 and 29, 2023
Dr. Dan Nettleton from Iowa State University will be our 50th Hogg and Craig Lecturer.
Early in the 1969-70 academic year, Professor Allen T. Craig announced his retirement. He gave a retirement talk in January 1970. Under the leadership of Craig’s student and co-author, Professor Robert V. Hogg, the department decided to establish a lecture series to honor Professor Craig. His January 1970 talk was the first in this series. When Professor Hogg passed away at the age of 90 in 2014, the department decided to incorporate his name into the lecture series.
https://stat.uiowa.edu/hogg-and-craig-lectures
Dan Nettleton received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics with a minor in computer science from Wartburg College. He earned MS and PhD degrees in statistics from the University of Iowa with the financial support of a National Collegiate Athletic Association postgraduate scholarship and a University of Iowa fellowship. After four years as a faculty member at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, he joined the Department of Statistics at Iowa State in 2000. Nettleton was named the Laurence H. Baker Endowed Chair in Biological Statistics in 2007, Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2008, Distinguished Professor in 2015, and chair of the Department of Statistics at Iowa State in 2019. He has co-authored more than 180 refereed journal articles and served as principal or co-principal investigator on more than 30 federal grants totaling approximately $40M. Nettleton’s research interests include statistical methods for the design and analysis of high-dimensional biological datasets, multiple testing, hierarchical modeling, statistical learning, and analysis of sports data. Nettleton is currently secretary of the statistics section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and chair-elect of the American Statistical Association Caucus of Academic Representatives.
Program, briefly
Friday, April 28 - 2520D University Capitol Centre
11:15 am Hogg and Craig Cake; Poster Session featuring current graduate students
12:15 pm Opening Remarks and Awards Ceremony
1:00 pm Hogg and Craig Lecture #1 by Dan Nettleton:
"My Adventures in Sports Statistics, Beginning With Bob Hogg"
Abstract:
I was a student in an introductory mathematical statistics course Bob Hogg taught in the spring of 1992. Professor Hogg told many stories and seemed to have a lot of fun telling them. His enthusiasm for his stories and for statistics convinced me that I had made the right choice to pursue a graduate degree in statistics. One of Professor Hogg’s examples used data from Major League Baseball to illustrate Simpson’s Paradox. I was fascinated and interested in combining statistics with my enjoyment of sports. This talk will cover some of my work in the area of sports statistics, including my first refereed publication, which investigates homecourt advantage for the 1997 University of Iowa men’s basketball team. Other topics in the presentation include (1) estimating win probability during competitions, such as National Football League games; (2) improving the Iowa High School Athletic Association’s approach to ranking football teams; and (3) estimating victory probabilities for the canceled 2020 National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournaments.
2:15 pm Panel Discussions on "Hot Topics in Actuarial Science" featuring Barbara Hogg (Aon), David Dillon (Lewis & Ellis), Andy Ferris (Deloitte Consulting), and Larry Lickteig (Transamerica)
Saturday, April 29 - Big Ten Theatre, 348 Iowa Memorial Union
8:30 am Refreshments
8:45 am Opening Remarks and Departmental Faculty Research Showcase featuring Lan Luo, Sanvesh Srivastava, Luke Tierney, Zhiwei Tong, Boxiang Wang, and Xinyu Zhang
10:15 am Hogg and Craig Lecture #2 by Dan Nettleton:
"Who Is Winning? Determining Whether a Candidate Leads in a Ranked-Choice Election"
Abstract:
In an election with more than two candidates, it can be surprisingly complicated to determine whether a candidate is leading from the results of a survey. Even under the simplifying assumption of a simple random sample from an effectively infinite population, there are interesting statistical aspects to consider. Testing whether a particular candidate leads in the population involves a likelihood ratio test whose asymptotic null distribution is a chi-square mixture of the type arising in order-restricted inference. Complexity increases for elections in which each voter is asked to rank candidates on a ballot rather than simply choosing a most preferred candidate. In such ranked-choice elections, instant-runoff voting is often used to determine a winner. We explore how to test whether a particular candidate leads in the voting population based on candidate rankings provided by a sample of voters. We discuss a likelihood ratio test, an intersection-union test, and a simple Bayesian approach for evaluating whether a candidate leads a multi-candidate race in an election that uses ranked-choice and instant-runoff voting.
1:30 pm Research Talks on "Emerging Topics and Practice in Data Science" featuring Subhashish Chakravarty (Collins Aerospace), Aaron Christ (United States Fish and Wildlife Service), Kun Chen (University of Connecticut), Dai Feng (Abbvie), and Congrui Yi (Amazon)
3:30 pm Panel Discussions on "Paths to Becoming a Successful Data Scientist" featuring Levent Bayman (Labcorp Drug Development), Yeh-Fong Chen (FDA), Rui Jin (Novartis), Zhijiang Van Liu (Google), Javier Porras (Zurich North America), and Bo Wang (Meta)
Saturday, April 29 - Iowa Memorial Union
6:00 pm Banquet Dinner and Closing Remarks (reservation required)