Murray/Ollivier Address (re-scheduled, date TBA)

Apr 22 2:00 pm
Speaker

Dr. Jeff Wu, Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech, Member of National Academy of Engineering, Academician of Academia Sinica, Fellow of IMS and ASA

Title

Murray/Ollivier Address

Subtitle

From real world problems to esoteric research: examples and personal experience

Physical Location

TBA

RE-SCHEDULED! DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED LATER!

Abstract:

Young (and some not-so-young) researchers often wonder how to extract good research ideas and develop useful methodologies from solving real world problems. The path is rarely straightforward and its success depends on the circumstances, tenacity and luck. I will use two examples to illustrate how I trod the path. The first involved an attempt to find optimal growth conditions for nano structures. It led to the development of a new method “sequential minimum energy design (smed)”, which exploits an analogy to potential energy of charged particles. After a few years of frustrated efforts and relentless pursuit, we realized that smed is more suitable for generating samples adaptively to mimic an arbitrary distribution rather than for optimization. The main objective of the second example was to build an efficient statistical emulator based on finite element simulation results with two mesh densities in cast foundry operations. It eventually led to the development of a class of nonstationary Gaussian process models that can be used to connect simulation data of different precisions and speeds. In each example, the developed methodology has broader applications beyond the original problem. I will explain the thought process in each example.  Finally, I will share some secrets about a “path to innovation”.

 

About the Guest Speaker

C. F. Jeff Wu is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2004), and a Member (Academician) of Academia Sinica (2000). A Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1984), the American Statistical Association (1985), the American Society for Quality (2002), and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (2009). He received the COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) Presidents' Award in 1987, which was given to the best researcher under the age of 40 per year and was commissioned by five statistical societies. His other major awards include the 2011 COPSS Fisher Lecture, the 2012 Deming Lecture (plenary lectures during the annual Joint Statistical Meetings), the Shewhart Medal (2008) from ASQ, and the Pan Wenyuan Technology Award (2008). In 2016 he received the (inaugural) Akaike Memorial Lecture Award. In 2017 he received the George Box Medal from ENBIS. In 2020 he won The Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award and the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award both at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has won numerous other awards, including the Wilcoxon Prize, the Brumbaugh Award (twice), the Jack Youden Prize (twice), and the Honoree of the 2008 Quality and Productivity Research Conference. He was the 1998 P. C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lecturer at the Indian Statistical Institutes and an Einstein Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is an Honorary Professor at several institutions, including the CAS and National Tsinghua University. He received an honorary doctor (honoris causa) of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in 2008.

He was formerly the H. C. Carver Professor of Statistics and Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, 1993-2003 and the GM/NSERC Chair in Quality and Productivity at the University of Waterloo in 1988-1993. In his 1997 inaugural lecture for the Carver Chair, he coined the term data science and advocated that statistics be renamed data science and statistician to data scientist. Before Waterloo, he taught in the Statistics Department at the University of Wisconsin from 1977-1988. He got his BS in Mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1971 and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley (1973-1976).

His work is widely cited in professional journals as well as in magazines, including a feature article about his work in Canadian Business and a special issue of Newsweek on quality. He has served as editor or associate editor for several major statistical journals like Annals of Statistics, Journal of American Statistical Association, Technometrics, and Statistica Sinica. Professor Wu has published more than 185 research articles in peer review journals. He has supervised 50 Ph.D.'s, out of which more than 25 are teaching in major research departments or institutions in statistics, engineering, or business in US/Canada/Asia/Europe. Among them, there are 21 Fellows of ASA, IMS, ASQ, IAQ and IIE, three editors of Technometrics, and one editor of JQT. He co-authors with Mike Hamada the book "Experiments: Planning, Analysis, and Optimization" (Wiley, 2nd Ed, 2009, 716 pages) and with R. Mukerjee the book "A Modern Theory of Factorial Designs" (Springer, 2006).

Awards and Honors

  • Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award 2020
  • George Box Medal, ENBIS (European Network of Business and Industrial Statistics) 2017
  • (inaugural) Akaike Memorial Lecture Award, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo, and Japan Statistical Society 2016
  • Deming Lecture Award, American Statistical Association 2012
  • COPSS R.A. Fisher Lecture Award 2011
  • Einstein Chair Professor, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 2011
  • Honorary Doctor (honoris causa) of Mathematics, University of Waterloo 2008
  • Shewhart Medal, American Society of Quality 2008
  • Conference Honoree, Quality and Productivity Research Conference, Madison, WI 2008
  • Pan Wenyuan Technology Award, Taiwan 2008
  • Honorary Professor (life), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing 2006
  • Member, National Academy of Engineering 2004
  • Member (Academician), Academia Sinica 2000
  • P. C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lectures, Indian Statistical Institute 1998
  • COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) Presidents Award 1987
  • Sloan Research Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 1983