Service

Service covers activities separate from research or teaching. These are organized by the communities served.

University

Description of various administrative positions held as well as university governance and significant committee memberships.

Governance

• UW Senate

  • Senator 2008-2011, an elected Math Faculty representative
  • Senate Long Range Planning Committee 2008-2009
  • Senate Undergraduate Council (faculty at large) 1996-1999

• UW Board of Governors

  • Governor representing faculty senators 2008-2010

• UCIST University Committee on Information Systems and Technology

  • Math Faculty representative 1998-2001, 2010-2014
  • Faculty Focus Group on the Graduate Application System 2011-2012
  • Development of University’s Information Systems strategic plan 2012-2013

• UW Policy 77 “three-person Tribunal” member

  • adjudicates an appeal of a “negative tenure or promotion decision by the President”
  • 2011 and 2013

• Nominating committee member

  • Provost and Vice President (Academic)
    • 2000-2001 (Amit Chakma)
    • 2009-2010 (Feridun Hamdullahpur)
  • UW Associate Provost (Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies) (Faculty Assoc. appointed member) 2016
  • Chief Information Officer 2011-2012
  • IST Director (Enterprise Architect) 2013
  • Director, School of Accountancy and Finance as Provost’s representative 2011-2012

• Academic Review of Department of Philosophy 2009-2010

  • internal (UW) committee member (Provost’s)

• Hagey Lectures Committee member 2004-2012

  • recommend Ian Hacking’s How did mathematics become possible?
    

Administration

• Faculty of Mathematics

  • Associate Dean (Computing)
    • 1998-2001 and 2011-2014
  • Director of the Math Faculty Computing Facility
    • 1998-2001 and 2011-2014
    • technical staff of 10-20
  • Director, the Centre for Computational Mathematics in Industry and Commerce
    • 2003-2006 and 2008-2011
    • undergraduate and graduate programmes in Computational Mathematics
    • industrial liaison and research seminars
  • Interim Director of Data Science (undergraduate)
    • 2016-2017
  • Dean’s Advisory Committee
    • 1998-2001, 2007-2009, and 2010-2014
  • Math Faculty Advisory Committee 2005-2009
  • Industrial Research Advisory Committee 2005-2008
  • Math Faculty Representative Council 2003-2006
  • Math Faculty Council Executive Committee
    
    • 1995-2001 and 2013-2014
      

• Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science

  • Associate Chair (Undergraduate)
    • 1990-1993, 1995, and 1996-1997
  • Appointments committee
    • 1993-2000, 2003-2006, 2009-2011, 2015-2016, 2017, 2018-2019, 2019-2020
  • Tenure and promotion 2009-2011

Professional

Description of various professional society memberships, official duties, and conference organization.

Societies

• Statistical Society of Canada

  • member since 1985
  • Elected regional (Ontario) representative on Board of Directors 2003-2007
  • Awards Committee 2007-2008
  • Chair of Inaugural Lise Manchester Award 2008
    
    • “The award recognizes excellence in statistical research which considers problems of public interest and which is potentially useful for formation of Canadian public policy.
  • Chair of Canadian Journal of Statistics Award for the best paper published in CJS in 2008

• International Statistical Institute

  • elected a member in 1996
  • International Association for Statistical Computing or IASC
    • elected member of Council 1991-1995
  • Jan Tinbergen Awards for Young Statisticians
    • committee member for 2017
    • committee chair for 2019

• Society for Artificial Intelligence and Statistics

  • a non-membership New Jersey (USA) incorporated nonprofit organization created to run the International Workshop/Conference on AI and Statistics workshops (AISTATS)
  • one of three founding members (with Bill Gale and Daryl Pregibon of AT&T Bell Laboratories)
  • governing board member 1988-1997
    

• other memberships

  • American Statistical Association since 1980s
  • Royal Statistical Society fellow from 1980s to about 2017
    

Conferences

• Chair/co-chair

  • Statistics, Science, and Public Policy with Agnes Herzberg of Queen’s University held at Herstmonceux Castle, England
    • IX: Science and Government 2004
    • VIII: Science Ethics and the Law 2003
    • VII: Environment, Health and Globalization 2002
    • VI: Science and Responsibility 2001
  • 4th International Workshop on AI and Statistics 1993 with Peter Cheeseman of NASA-Ames held in Ft. Lauderdale, FL
    

• Programme committee member

  • Fourth International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis 2001 in Lisbon, Portugal
  • Third International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis 1999 in Amsterdam
  • International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics in Ft. Lauderdale, FL
    • 2nd through 6th being the AISTATS conferences for years 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1997
  • IASC
    • for sessions of the 49th Session of the ISI 1993 Firenze, Italy
    • IASC Satellite meeting on Statistical Databases 1993 Sienna, Italy

• Session organizer

  • numerous sessions over the years for the SSC, ASA, IMS, and the Interface of Computer Science and Statistics meetings

Research

Description of various editorial and peer review duties excluding conference programme committees and refereeing.

Journals

• Statistics and Computing

  • Editor in Chief 2001-2006
  • Editorial Advisory Board 2006-2012
  • Associate Editor 1990-2001

• International Statistical Review

  • Associate Editor 1994-1998

• Journal of the American Statistical Association or JASA

  • Associate Editor (Theory & Methods) 1990-1994
    

• Journal of the Computational and Graphical Statistics or JCGS

  • Associate Editor 1990-1993
    
    

• Referee for Neural Computation, NIPS, AISTATS, SIGIR, JASA, JCGS, The American Statistician, Technometrics, SIAM Journal for Scientific and Statistical Computing, Journal of Econometrics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, International Statistical Review, Canadian Journal of Statistics, Sankhya, Journal of Statistical Education, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Statistics and Computing, and others.

Grants

• Mathematical Sciences Committee member for Science Foundation of Ireland

  • Research Centres 2007
  • Research Grants 2006
    

• Reviewer for various granting agencies (e.g. NSERC, NSF)

Public

Description of various engagements with the greater public community. Includes such items as

• media engagements
• government engagement
• private industry

Media

This is principally commentary (solicited or provocative) on some timely issues of public interest.

• Hillary Clinton’s emails as a web application and YouTube lecture 2017

• Lotteries and probability of winning

  • local television CTV news 2012, 2016
  • local 570 News radio 2016
    

• Long form census controversy

  Contributed to the writing and production of a video for World Statistics Day 2010. This garnered national and international press and was referenced in Question Period of the Canadian Senate (see Hansard of the Senate of Canada October 20, 2010)

• debunking US Military experiments on extra-sensory perception (ESP) for (The Globe and Mail) newspaper science writer Stephen Strauss

Government science

• Co-authored report entitled Statistics, Science and Public Policy: Recommendations for Government and the Scientific Community distributed by the Right Honourable Peter Milliken, then Speaker of the House of Commons (Canada) to members of the parliament of Canada and to various Canadian federal ministries. 2004

• Talks given to government agencies/labs include

  • Statistics Canada Ottawa
  • National Research Council Institute for Biodiagnostics (NRC-IBD) Winnipeg

• Canada Border Services as part of a small research engagement to assess predictive models for choosing marine containers to search for contraban (with Mu Zhu)

• Consultant to a computational group in the Federal Reserve Board in Washington 1988

Private industry

Consultant to various companies large and small. Two of the local startups include

• Primal Fusion, now Primal AI where with former Ph.D. student Wu Zhou provided the theoretical underpinnings for a few patents

• the “Internet of things” company Terepac

General outreach

• Online full course of lectures on data visualization 2017

• Short course on “Statistics for the Media” given to the Canadian Science Writers at their annual conference 1990

• Various one off presentations to high school math teachers and students