Nicholas J. Horton, Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society (Statistics and Data Science) at Amherst College and Harvard Biostatistics alumnus, has been selected as the recipient of the 2023 Mosteller Statistician of the Year award by the Boston Chapter. This award honors individuals from academia, industry, and government who have made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and who have shown outstanding service to the statistical community, including the Boston Chapter. A list of past awardees can be found here.Monday, October 30 · 6 – 8pm EDTHarvard Statistics Department, Science Center Rm 316Register here60 years ago, Fred Mosteller and David Wallace published a paper in JASA that made inferences in an important authorship problem: the Federalist papers. Notwithstanding this groundbreaking work, text continues to be an important example of unstructured data that has traditionally been nearly absent from the statistics curriculum in secondary schools and early post-secondary education, despite the importance that the written word has in all aspects of education and society. In this talk, Dr. Horton will review Mosteller’s work and legacy, describe a more modern classification problem, discuss how new learners approached text analytics, and conclude with some thoughts about statistics and data science amidst the advent of powerful generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Bard.
2023 Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award Event – 10/30
