Congratulations Francis - J B Douglas Award and IBS student prize winner

A big congrats to Francis Hui, winner of this year's J.B.Douglas Award for best post-graduate talk by a statistics student in New South Wales.  Apparently the standard was very high this year and Francis wow'd them with his new group penalties for mixture models, motivated by the problem of multi-species distribution modelling - predicting where a species is as best we can, borrowing strength across species.  Well done, Francis!

UPDATE (9th December): another gong for Francis: runner-up prize at Biometrics at the Canals, the biennial International Biometrics Society (Australasian Region) conference.  Nicely done Francis!

An interview with Noel Cressie

An interview with Distinguished Professor Noel Cressie of the University of Wollongong, a big name in spatial statistics, advocate of hierarchical modeling in ecology, and author of a key reference text in spatial statistics, and more recently "Statistics for Spatio-temporal data" with Chris Wikle; we discuss all of these topics.

Dr Renner it is

Ian Renner has been officially awarded his PhD for a thesis titled "Advances in Presence-Only Methods in Ecology".  Congratulations Ian!  Now to publish some of those chapters..

Slides from Eco-Stats Symposium now on-line

http://www.eco-stats.unsw.edu.au/slides.html

Interview with Trevor Hastie

An interview with Trevor Hastie, The John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences
at Stanford, for Methods in Ecology and Evolution.  We discuss a recent response he wrote to a 2012 MEE paper by Andy Royle et al.

TIES conference in Anchorage, Alaska

Congratulations to Francis Hui who battled 22 hours of sunlight a day, got within meters of a wild moose, saw a cool ice glacier and earned an honorable mention in the student category for his presentation: "Variable selection in multi-species mixture modeling" at the 23rd annual International Environmetrics Society conference in Anchorage, Alaska, USA, 2013. Well done!

Eco-Stats now on Twitter, and Facebook

Eco-Stats is now on twitter, @ecostats
and on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/ecostats.unsw

God help us all.