Eco-Stats Symposium program now available

The final program for the Eco-Stats Symposium has now been released.  I'm delighted with the line-up, it looks like a pretty exciting group of speakers!

Fine wine and arcsine asinine

Congratulations to David Warton and Francis Hui for winning the UNSW Evolution & Ecology Research Centre's Citation Classic Award. Their paper, Warton, D. I., and Hui, F.K.C. (2011) The arcsine is asinine: the analysis of proportions in ecology. Ecology 92: 3-10. DOI:10.1890/10-0340.1, received 44 web of knowledge citations in 2012. Many statisticians will agree that that is an impressive statistic.
The two were awarded with a fine bottle of wine, which presumably has already been consumed.

Big news about MAXENT

Ian Renner and I just published a paper in Biometrics show in the MAXENT is mathematically equivalent to a GLM (and hence related to poisson point process models).  See the Methods Blog for a more detailed post on this result and its implications.

Welcome Sara Taskinen

Welcome to Sara Taskinen of the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland (pictured below - she's the one in the middle!).  Sara will be visiting us here at UNSW for all of 2013.  She is an expert in robust statistics especially with multivariate applications, so we've been doing some work robustifying methods of estimation and inference about allometric lines, i.e. modifying how MA and SMA lines are estimated so that they are less sensitive to outliers.  Some of our earlier work has already been incorporated into the SMATR package, and a paper on some of our earlier ideas on how to construct robust confidence intervals for slope was recently published in the Biometrical Journal.  We've since been robustifying methods of hypothesis testing about one or several allometric lines - paper and code coming soon!

Eco-Stats symposium in Sydney Australia, July 11-12 2013

Congrats all round

Some good news at Eco-Stats in the last week or so:
- David was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship for 2012-2016, to focus his time on developing tools for predictive modelling of communities using multivariate data in ecology.
- Alice just landed a tenure-track position at Hong Kong Baptist University, starting September 2012.  Super news.
- Our visitor Alireza Faraz just landed a prestigious tenure-track position at U. Liege.
Congrats all round - party time!

Welcome Alireza

Dr Alireza Faraz, U. Liege Belgium, is visiting Eco-Stats until the end of the year.  He has expertise in the application of control charts to multivaraite data, and will focus on applying such methodology to multivariate abundance data in ecology.
Welcome Alireza!