Statistics at UCSC
News
05/15/2019 - Keynote talk at LLNL Workshop: I will be giving the keynote talk at the 2019 LLNL Data Science Institute Workshop on July 23 and 24. The talk is entitled Data and Ethics: Old Issues and New Challenges.
04/18/1019 - SBSS Outstanding Section Service Award: I am honored to be receiving the inaugural Outstanding Section Service Award from the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association. The Award will be handed during the SBSS business meeting at the JSM in Denver on July 30.
03/31/2019 - UCSB Talk (again): I will be giving another invited talk at the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara on April 18. This time, I will be talking about modeling Cognitive Social Structures.
02/31/2019 - UCLA Talk: I will be giving an invited talk at the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles on April 4. The talk is entitled Adventures in Dimensionland: Geometry, Dimensionality and Clustering in Revealed Preference Models.
11/30/2019 - UC Data Science Leadership Meeting: I will be participating in the UC Data Science Leadership Meeting at UC Irvine this coming January 17.
10/15/2018 - Chancellor's Advisory Search Committee: I have been appointed as a faculty representative to the Advisory Search Committee for a New UCSC Chancellor.
09/15/2018 - Talk at the VI COBAL: I will be giving a keynote talk at the upcoming Latin American Conference on Bayesian Statistics (COBAL, by its spanish acronym), which will be held in Lima, Peru between June 19 and June 21, 2019.
08/30/2018 - Workshop on the future of statistics: I have been invited to participate in the NSF-sponsored workshop "Statistics at a Crossroads - Challenges and Opportunities in the Data Science Era" on October October 15-17, 2018. The workshop will be held in Arlington, Virginia.
08/15/2018 - OSU Talk: On January 7 I will be giving an invited talk at the Department of Statistics at Oregon State University.
08/05/2018 - UCSB Talk: On November 28 I will be giving an invited talk at the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The talk will focus on my work on spherical factor models.
08/01/2018 - BYU Talk: On October 18 I will be giving an invited talk at the Department of Statistics at Brigham Young University.
07/15/2018 - ATD Workshop: Once again I am organizing the annual ATD workshop in collaboration with Michael Baron at American University in DC. The workshop will be held on October 10 and October 11, 2018.
06/15/2018 - NAEM webinar: On August 14 I will be speaking about how mathematics can have an impact on defense and national security in the monthly webinar series organized by the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics (BMSA) within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
06/12/2018 - LLNL/UCNL DSI workshop: I will be presenting recent work on spherical factor models for binary data at the Joint LLNL & UCNL Data Science Workshop to be held at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab on August 7 and 8. A number of my students and postdocs will also be presenting posters at the workshop.
05/28/2018 - Data Science Undergraduate Education Workshop: I will be attending the Workshop on Undergraduate Data Science Pedagogy & Practice to be held July 16-19 at UC Berkeley.
05/01/2018 - TRIPODS PI Meeting: On October 23 and 24 the UCSC TRIPODS team will be hosting the 2nd NSF TRIPODS PI meeting at the UCSC Silicon Valley campus.
04/10/2018 - Visit to LLNL: I will be giving a talk on statistical analysis of hyper spectral imaging at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab on May 31.
04/02/2018 - New book: Our new book "Probability, Decisions and Games: A Gentle Introduction using R" is available from Wiley!
03/31/2018 - FNE/CLATSE in Mexico: I will be giving a plenary talks at 33th Meeting of the Mexican Statistical Association (XXXIII FNE)/13th Latin American Congress of Statistical Societies (XIII CLATSE) that will take place in Guadalajara, Mexico on October 1-5.
03/15/2018 - Congreso Colombiano de Estadistica: I will be presenting a plenary talk and giving a short course at the II Congreso Colombiano de Estadistica in Cali on November 8-12.
03/01/2018 - ISBA Meeting: I will be attending the 2018 ISBA World Meeting in Edinburgh on June 24-29, where I will be giving a talk about nonparametric models for ranking data.
02/12/2018 - NSBE: I will be attending the 44th Annual Convention of the National Society of Black Engineers in Pittsburgh on March 21-25.
02/15/2018 - Data Science Leadership Summit: I will be attending the first Data Science Leadership Summit at Columbia University on 03/26/2018. The event is part of Columbia's 2018 Data Science Week.
02/01/2018 - Graduate Interview Panel: Today I am participating in a panel for undergraduate students who are interested in graduate school on how to prepare for interviews.
01/24/2018 - Sharmistha Guha wins SBSS student paper competition: Sharmistha, one of my PhD students, won one of the student paper awards from the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association. The paper also won the student paper competition of the 2017 International Indian Statistical Association.
01/15/2018 - Talk at the Symposium on Data Science and Statistics: I will be giving a talk on networks models for financial trading networks 2018 Symposium on Data Science & Statistics to be held at Reston, VA between May 16 and May 19, 2018.
01/01/2018 - CPSRC launch: UCSC is launching a new Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center, in which I am an affiliated faculty.
01/01/2018 - Member of the FOC of ASA: Today I am starting a two-year term in the Financial Oversight Committee of the Council of Sections of the American Statistical Association.
09/29/2017 - Talk at Cal State Chico: And today I am repeating my talk"Spherical Factor Analysis for Binary Data: A Look at the Conservative Revolt in the US House of Representatives" at the Department of Mathematics at California State University, Chico.
09/27/2017 - Talk at San Jose State Univeristy: Today I am giving the talk "Spherical Factor Analysis for Binary Data: A Look at the Conservative Revolt in the US House of Representatives" at the Department of Mathematics at SJSU.
09/26/2017 - More news coverage: An interview with the Santa Cruz Sentinel about D3 and our TRIPODS award.
09/05/2017 - San Francisco Chronicle article: The UC system and UCSC received some positive news coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle. Our Data Science Initiative is discussed.
08/24/2017 - NSF TRIPODS Award: UCSC is the recepient one of twelve NSF Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) Awards. I am one of the Co-PIs on the award. You can see the press release from UCSC here!
07/15/2017 - Algorithms for Thread Detection Kickoff Workshop: I am organizing the kickoff workshop for this new research program supported by the National Science Foundationa and the National Geospatial Agency.
07/11/2017 - News article on D3: The Silicon Valley Business Journal wrote a profile on our new Data, Discovery and Decision Research Center. You can see the article by clicking here!
06/30/2017 - Becoming a CITL Fellow: I will be a Fellow of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning at UCSC during the 2017-2018 academic year.
06/29/2017 - New data science research center launched: UCSC's new Data, Discovery and Decision (D3) Research Center has been officially launched. D3, of which I am Associate Director, aims at developing partnerships between industry and academia. You can see the official press release here.
05/02/2017 - New Postdoctoral Researcher: Claudia Wehrhahn will be joining my research group effective June 1. She will be working on nonparametric Bayesian models and their implementation in the NIMBLE environment. Welcome Claudia!!!
04/30/2017 - Meeting of the Classification Society: I will be giving a talk on "Bayesian spatial model selection for detection and identification in chemical plumes based on hyperspectral imagery data" at the 2017 Meeting of the Classification Society.
04/12/2017 - AMS organizes Summer School on Spatio-Temporal modeling: The statistics groups is organizing a 5-day Summer School entitled "Bayesian Modeling For Spatial And Spatio-Temporal Data" between August 14 and August 18, 2017. The main speaker will be Alan Gelfand, other speakers include Michele Guindani, Sudipto Banerjee and Christopher Paciorek.
04/01/2017 - Associate Dean of Graduate Affairs: Starting July 1st, 2017 I will be serving as Associate Dean of Graduate Affairs at BSOE.
03/10/2017 - BAD Math Day: I will be giving a talk entitled "On species sampling sequences induced by residual allocation models" at the Bay Area Discrete Mathematics Day on April 29.
02/01/2017 - Short course on Bayesian Computation: I will be teaching a one-day shortcourse entitled "Applied Bayesian Computational Methods" in collaboration with Christopher Paciorek from UC Berkeley at the 2017 Joint Statistical Meetings in Baltimore.
I am a Professor of Statistics at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I am also the Associate Director of the Center for Data, Discovery, and Decisions (D3) at UC Santa Cruz, and served as Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs in the School until September 2019. I develop statistical methods for complex problems in biology, social sciences, and engineering. My research interests include Bayesian statistics and machine learning, especially nonparametric methods, spatial temporal models, network analysis and extreme value theory.
I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. I obtained my undergraduate degrees at Universidad Catolica Andres Bello and Universidad Simon Bolivar, majoring in Law and Industrial Engineering, respectively. In 2000 I completed my M.S. in Statistics at Universidad Simon Bolivar and, after working for four years, I moved to the US to pursue a Ph.D. in Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University. At Duke I also completed an M.A. in Economics and a certificate in Computational Biology. Since 2007 I have been at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics (and, since July 1, 2018, at the Department of Statistics) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, first as an Assistant Professor (between 2007 and 2011), then as an Associate Professor (between 2011 and 2015), and now as a Full Professor. During the academic year 2012-2013 I received a Donald D. Harrington Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin.
I am currently an Associate Editor for the Annals of Applied Statistics and for Bayesian Analysis. I am also a member of the Board of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis and served in various capacities for the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.