Teaching
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.
Funding
Undergraduate Teaching
UC Santa Cruz has always been ahead of the times in recognizing the key role that data and uncertainty play in everyday life. In 2009, UC Santa Cruz introduced Statistical Reasoning as a General Education requirement for all its undergraduate students.
Introducing the main concepts behind probability and statistics can be challenging even when students have quantitative backgrounds. Successfully doing it with an undergraduate population as diverse as that of UCSC is extremely difficult. It soon became clear to me that the standard “STATS 101” course would not work for a substantial number of our students. This motivated me to create a series of introductory courses that could fill this gap in our curriculum.
The first course in this series was Gambling and Gaming (AMS 080A), which I offered for the first time in the Fall of 2009. AMS 080A uses casino games such as roulette, quino and blackjack, as well as games of strategy such as poker, chess and tic-tac-toe to introduce students to probability, statistics and decision theory. Out of an effort to create material that for this course was borne my newest textbook, which will be published later this year:
Rodriguez, A. and Mendes, B. (2017) Gambling and Gaming: A Gentle Introduction to Probability, Statistics and Game Theory. Wiley.
The second course in this series is The Art of Data Visualization (AMS 080B), which I offered for the first time in 2014. This course is targeted at students from the humanities and the arts, and combines concepts from statistics, design, and cognitive psychology. I am currently
Graduate Teaching
I have taught many of our introductory graduate courses, including Introduction to Classical Statistical Inference (AMS 205B), Intermediate Bayesian Statistics (AMS 206B) and Linear Statistical Models (AMS 256). In addition, I have taught a number of elective courses in our program, including Stochastic Processes (AMS 263) and Bayesian Nonparametric Models (AMS 241).
I have recently been involved in an effort to strengthen the graduate service curriculum offered by out department. The first step in that effort was the introduction of a course on Applied Bayesian Statistics (AMS 206) targeting graduate students in other departments who have an interest in using Bayesian methods in their research. The next step is the introduction of a series of introductory courses covering statistical computing, data visualization, reproducible research, and data wrangling and targeted at non-statisticians. The first two of those course (AMS 266A and AMS 266C) will be offered in the fall of 2017.
Continuous Education
I regularly teach continuous education courses, usually in the context of various conferences. Below is a list of recent and upcoming courses:
- Applied Bayesian Computational Methods, Joint Statistical Meetings 2017, Baltimore.
- An Introduction to R and Data Visualization, 2016 Conference on Applied Statistics in Defense (CASD), Washington, D.C.
- Bayesian Computation, 2016 ISBA World Meeting, Sardinia, Italy.
- The Art of Data Visualization, Joint Statistical Meetings 2015, Seattle.
- Bayesian statistical methods - Congreso Bayesiano de América Latina (COBAL) 2015, Medellin, Colombia.
- Nonparametric Bayesian methods, 2014 ISBA World Meeting, Cancun, Mexico.
- Modern Computational Methods for Bayesian Statistics, Second Latin American School on Bayesian Statistics, Chetumal, Mexico.
- Bayesian Nonparametric Methods, 2013 Joint Statistical Meetings, Montreal, Canada.
- Bayesian Nonparametric Methods, Veracruz, Mexico.
- Bayesian nonparametric methods, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
- Bayesian Nonparametric Methods, 2009 Joint Statistical Meeting, Washington, DC.