This year's lecture

Speaker: Dr. Daniela Witten
Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics, and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair in Mathematical Statistics, University of Washington

When: April 24 and April 25, 2024

Learn more about the speaker
Daniela Witten

Daniela Witten is a professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at University of Washington, and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair in Mathematical Statistics. She develops statistical machine learning methods for high-dimensional data, with a focus on unsupervised learning.

Daniela is the recipient of an NIH Director's Early Independence Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Simons Investigator Award in Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems. She received the Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS), awarded annually to a statistician under age 41 in recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of statistics. She also received the Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association for a statistician under age 40 who has made outstanding contributions to statistics for public health, and the Leo Breiman Award for contributions to the field of statistical machine learning. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute for Mathematical Statistics, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

Daniela is a co-author (with Gareth James, Trevor Hastie, and Rob Tibshirani) of the very popular textbook Introduction to Statistical Learning. She has served as an Associate Editor for Biometrika, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and Journal of the American Statistical Association, and as an Action Editor for Journal of Machine Learning Research. Since 2023, she serves as Joint Editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B.

Daniela completed a BS in Math and Biology with Honors and Distinction at Stanford University in 2005, and a PhD in Statistics at Stanford University in 2010. 

Schedule

Thursday, April 24

  • Refreshments and Awards in 302 Schaeffer Hall (SH), time TBD
  • 3:30 p.m. Lecture #1, location TBD

Title to come

Abstract to come

Friday, April 25

  • 2:30 p.m. Reception in 241 Schaeffer Hall (SH)
  • 3:30 p.m. Lecture #2, location TBD

Title to come

Abstract to come

History of the lectures

Portrait of Bob Hogg
Bob Hogg

When the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science was created in 1965, it had 5 faculty members: Bob Hogg, Allen Craig, John Birch, Lloyd Knowler, and Jim Hickman. Hogg was the founding chair of the department.

Craig, who earned his UI PhD in 1931, was the doctoral advisor of Hogg, who earned his UI PhD in 1950. By then, Craig had already made important contributions to the profession. Indeed, he was instrumental in getting the Institute of Mathematical Statistics started and was on the original (1938) editorial board of the IMS’s Annals of Mathematical Statistics, along with Jerzy Neyman and Sam Wilks (UI PhD 1931). Hogg would go on to make important contributions of his own, serving as program secretary for the IMS from 1968-1974 and president of the American Statistical Association in 1988.

Portrait of Allen Craig
Allen Craig

Hogg and Craig had different personalities but shared many of the same passions. They both loved statistics and they both were terrific scholars and educators. They teamed up in 1958 to write one of the most popular mathematical statistics books ever written–the book known eponymously as “Hogg and Craig.”

The annual Craig Lectures began when Allen Craig delivered his retirement talk in 1970. In the following years, Craig Lectures included Fred Mosteller, Brad Efron, Bob Hogg, Jim Hickman, Carl Morris, Herman Chernoff, Luke Tierney, and Alan Agresti. When Bob Hogg passed away in 2014, the lectures were renamed the Hogg and Craig Lectures. Past Hogg and Craig Lecturers include Dick Dykstra, Xiao-Li Meng, David Donoho, and Donald Rubin.

Historical timeline

  • Lecture 51

    April 18-19, 2024

    Speaker: David Dunson, Duke University
    Topics: "Improving understanding of life on earth through novel data and statistics" and "Novel models and algorithms for massive-dimensional and sparse multivariate data"

  • Lecture 50

    April 28 and 29, 2023

    Speaker: Dan Nettleton, Iowa State University
    Topics: "My Adventures in Sports Statistics, Beginning With Bob Hogg" and "Who Is Winning? Determining Whether a Candidate Leads in a Ranked-Choice Election"

  • Lecture 49

    April 21 and 22, 2022

    Speaker: Donald B. Rubin, Harvard University
    Topics: "Essential Concepts of Causal Inference: A Remarkable History and an Intriguing Future” and “Conditional Calibration and the Sage Statistician”

  • Lecture 48

    April 15 and 16, 2021

    Speaker: Bin Yu, University of California at Berkeley
    Topics: "Veridical Data Science: the practice of responsible data analysis and decision-making” and “Iterative Random Forests (iRF) with applications to biomedical problems through epiTree for epistasis discovery”

  • Lecture 47

    April 25 and 26, 2019

    Speaker: David A. Harville, Iowa State University
    Topics: "Ranking/Rating Basketball or Football Teams: the NCAA Way and the ‘Right’ Way” and “Model-Based Prediction in General and in the Special Case of Ordinal Data”

  • Lecture 46

    April 26 and 27, 2018

    Speaker: David Donoho, Stanford University
    Topics: "50 Years of Data Science” and “Covariance Estimation in Light of the Spiked Covariance Model”

  • Lecture 45

    March 29 and 30, 2017

    Speaker: Xiao-Li Meng, Harvard University
    Topics: "From Euler to Clinton: An Unexpected Statistical Journey (Or: Size Does Matter, but You Might be in for a Surprise…)” and “Bayesian, Fiducial, and Frequentist (BFF): Best Friends Forever?”

  • Lecture 44

    2015

    Speaker: Richard L. Dykstra, University of Iowa
    Topics: "Fifty Years of Statistical Memories" and "Von Neumann's Alternating Projections and Dykstra's Algorithm"

  • Semi-Centennial Symposium

    2015

    We celebrated our department's Semi-Centennial Symposium this year!

  • Lectures renamed

    2014

    The annual Craig Lectures are officially renamed to be the Hogg and Craig Lectures after Bob Hogg passes away.

  • Lecture 43

    2014

    Speaker: Jianqing Fan, Princeton University
    Topics: "Statistical Challenges in Analysis of Big Data" and "Homogeneity Pursuit"

  • Lecture 42

    2013

    Speaker: Paul Embrechts, ETH Zurich
    Topics: “Thinking about Extremes” and “Model Uncertainty and Risk Aggregation”

  • Lecture 41

    2012

    Speaker: Rob Tibshirani, Stanford University
    Topics: “Finding consistent patterns: A nonparametric approach for identifying differential expression in RNA-Seq data” and “The lasso: some novel algorithms and applications”

  • Lecture 40

    2011

    Speaker: Alan Gelfand, Duke University
    Topics: "Space is the Place: Why spatial thinking matters for environmental problems" and "Point pattern modeling for degraded presence-only data over large regions"

  • Lecture 39

    2010

    Speaker: Terry Speed, University of California at Berkley
    Topic: "Removing Unwanted Variation From Microarray Data and Analysis of ChIP-Seq Data"

  • Lecture 38

    2009

    Speaker: George Casella, University of Florida
    Topics: "Estimation in Dirichlet Random Effects Models" and "From R. A. Fisher to Microarrays: Why 70-Year-Old Theory is Relevant Today"

  • Lecture 37

    2007

    Speaker: Nancy Reid, University of Toronto
    Topics: "Weighting the Likelihood Function" and "Putting Asymptotics to Work"

  • Lecture 36

    2006

    Speaker: Alan Agresti, University of Florida
    Topics: "Reducing Conservatism of Exact Small-Sample Inference for Discrete Data" and "A Twentieth Century Tour of Categorical Data Analysis"

  • Lecture 35

    2005

    Speaker: Jay Kadane, Carnegie Mellon University
    Topics: "Driving While Black: Differential Enforcement of the Traffic Laws on the New Jersey Turnpike" and "Is Ignorance Bliss?"

  • Lecture 34

    2004

    Speaker: Jim Berger, Duke University
    Topics: "Objective Bayesian Analysis: Its Uses in Practice and Its Role in the Unification of Statistics" and "Validation of Computer Models"

  • Lecture 33

    2003

    Speaker: Elizabeth Thompson, University of Washington
    Topics: "Linkage Detection for Complex Traits" and "Monte Carlo Estimation of Likelihood Functions: The Example of Multipoint Linkage LOD Scores"

  • Lecture 32

    2001

    Speaker: Luke Tierney, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
    Topics: "Some Adaptive Monte Carlo Methods for Bayesian Inference" and "Some Issues in the Design of R"

  • Lecture 31

    2000

    Speaker: Hans Gerber, University of Lausanne (Switzerland)
    Topics: "Trees R Us: From Kronecker and Esscher to Black and Scholes" and "Pricing Perpetual Options for Jump Processes: From Risk Theory to Finance"

  • Lecture 30

    1999

    Speaker: Howell Tong, London School of Economics and University of Hong Kong
    Topics: "Chaos in Statistics" and "Some Recent Non-Parametric Tools in Nonlinear Time Series"

  • Lecture 29

    1998

    Speaker: Ulf Grenander, Brown University
    Topics: "Computational Anatomy" and "A Bayesian Approach to Vision"

  • Lecture 28

    1997

    Speaker: John A. Hartigan, Yale University
    Topics: "The Effect of Proposition 48 on Graduation Rates of American Athletes" and "The Maximum Likelihood Prior"

  • Lecture 27

    1996

    Speaker: Trevor Hastie, Stanford University
    Topics: "Flexible Discriminant and Mixture Models" and "Metrics and Models for Handwritten Digit Recognition"

  • Lecture 26

    1995

    Speaker: F.T. (Tim) Wright, University of Missouri-Columbia
    Topics: "Harnessing Chance" and "Pseudo Likelihood Inferences for Ordered Survival Curves Under the Assumption of Proportional Hazards"

  • Lecture 25

    1994

    Speaker: Peter McCullagh, University of Chicago
    Topics: "The Role of Models in Statistics" and "Some Remarks on Over-Dispersion"

  • Lecture 24

    1993

    Speaker: Herman Chernoff, Harvard University
    Topics: "An Application of a Result of Elfving on the Optimal Design of Regression Experiments" and "The Distribution of the Likelihood-Ratio for Mixtures of Distributions with Application to Genetics"

  • Lecture 23

    1992

    Speaker: Herbert Robbins, Columbia University
    Topics: "Big N, Little n: Minimizing the Ethical Cost of a Clinical Trial" and "Estimation Under Biased Allocation"

  • Lecture 22

    1991

    Speaker: T.W. Anderson, Stanford University
    Topics: "R.A. Fisher and Multivariate Analysis" and "Goodness-of-fit Tests for Spectral Distributions"

  • Lecture 21

    1990

    Speaker: Thomas P. Hettmansperger, Pennsylvania State University
    Topics: "Simple Sign Based Inference in the Location Model" and "Rank Based Inference in the Linear Model".

  • Lecture 20

    1989

    Speaker: Ron Pyke, University of Washington
    Topics: "The Bell-Shaped Curve: A Central Role for Probability in Statistics" and "Set-Indexed Empirical, Quantile and Rank Processes"

  • Lecture 19

    1988

    Speaker: Tom Ferguson, University of California-Berkeley
    Topics: "Who Solved the Secretary Problem?" and "Some Time-Invariant Stopping Rule Problems"

  • Lecture 18

    1987

    Speaker: Carl Morris, University of Texas
    Topics: "Parametric Empirical Bayes: An Overview" and "Bayesian Empirical Bayes Interval Estimation: A Review of Recent Progress"

  • Lecture 17

    1986

    Speaker: Steve Stigler, University of Wisconsin
    Topics: "John Craig and the Probability of History" and "The History of Statistics in the Social Science: Recovering from the Central Limit Disaster"

  • Lecture 16

    1985

    Speaker: George E.P. Box, University of Wisconsin
    Topics: "Analyzing Fractional Designs" and "Thoughts on Some Ideas of Genichi Taguchi"

  • Lecture 15

    1984

    Speaker: Wayne Fuller, Iowa State University
    Topics: "Measurement Error in Regression" and "Nonlinear Measurement Error Models"

  • Lecture 14

    1983

    Speaker: J. Stuart Hunter, Princeton University
    Topics: "Theory Sigma: Quality Through Statistical Methods" and "Fractional Factorials: Sequential and Prior Analysis"

  • Lecture 13

    1982

    Speaker: Colin L. Mallows, Bell Telephone Laboratories
    Topics: "Robust Methods -- Applications and Basic Concepts" and "Robust Methods: Theory"

  • Lecture 12

    1981

    Speaker: David J. Bartholomew, London School of Economics and Political Science
    Topic: "Latent Variable Models in Statistics"

  • Lecture 11

    1980

    Speaker: James C. Hickman, University of Wisconsin
    Topics: "The Great Rates of Retirement Planning: Wages, Interest and Population" and "Bayesian Bivariate Graduation and Forecasting"

  • Lecture 10

    1979

    Speaker: Robert V. Hogg, University of Iowa
    Topics: "On Statistics at Iowa: Before 1950" and "On Statistics at Iowa: After 1950"

  • Lectures renamed

    1978

    The annual lectures are officially renamed to be the Allen T. Craig Lecture Series after Professor Craig passes away.

  • Lecture 9

    1978

    Speaker: J.L. Doob, University of Illinois
    Topics: "A Discrete Boundary Value Problem" and "A General First Boundary Value Problem for Laplace's Equation"

  • Lecture 8

    1977

    Speaker: Frank Proschan, Florida State University
    Topics: "A Class of Multivariate Functions in Ranking Problems" and "A Case History: Explaining an Observed Decreasing Failure Rate"

  • Lecture 7

    1976

    Speaker: Brad Efron, Stanford University
    Topics: "How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know?" and "Regression and ANOVA with 0-1 Data"

  • Lecture 6

    1975

    Speaker: Dennis V. Lindley, University College, London
    Topics: "Getting Married and Related Problems" and "Analysis of Variance"

  • Lecture 5

    1974

    Speaker: Jack Kiefer, Cornell University
    Topics: "Foundations of Statistics: Are There Any?" and "How to Find an Optimum Design"

  • Lecture 4

    1973

    Speaker: H.D. Brunk, Oregon State University
    Topics: "Bayesian Inference: Some Introductory Illustrations" and "Some Bayesian Approaches to Nonparametric Estimation"

  • Lecture 3

    1972

    Speaker: William Kruskal, University of Chicago
    Topics: "Federal Statistics: People and Problems" and "Statistics: Public Policy and Private Understanding"

  • Lecture 2

    1971

    Speaker: Frederick Mosteller, Harvard University
    Topic: "Statistics in Society"

  • Lecture 1

    1970

    Speaker: Allen T. Craig, University of Iowa
    Topic: "Retirement Talk"