A Word from Our 2006 Section Chairs

VOLUME 17, NO 1, JUNE 2006 A joint newsletter of the Statistical Computing & Statistical Graphics Sections of the American Statistical Association A Word from our 2006 Section Chairs PAUL MURRELL STEPHAN R. SAIN GRAPHICS COMPUTING I would like to begin by When Carey Priebe asked me highlighting a couple of to run for one of the section interesting recent offices a couple of years ago, I developments in the area of wasn’t exactly sure what I was Statistical Graphics. getting into. Now that I have There has been a lot of been chair for a couple of activity on the GGobi project months, I’m still not totally lately, with an updated web sure what I’ve gotten into. site, new versions, and The one thing I do know, improved links to R. I though, is that I’m very happy encourage you to (re)visit www.ggobi.org and see what to be involved in the section. they’ve been up to. There are a lot of very interesting things going on and, as always, a lot of opportunity for people who have an The third volume of the Handbook of Computational interest in statistical computing. Statistics, which is focused on Data Visualization, is scheduled for publication at the end of this year and Continues on Page 2.......... there will be a workshop as a satellite of Compstat 2006. This important volume will contain over 30 contributions and will provide a comprehensive overview of all areas of data visualization. Information about this project is available at gap.stat.sinica.edu.tw/ HBCSC. Featured Article 3 The big event for our section is of course the JSM in Tools for Computing 8 Seattle. Our program chair Juergen Symanzik and our program chair-elect Simon Urbanek have organised a Tools for Teaching 11 great program of invited sessions, contributed sessions, From the Field 16 and roundtables. Juergen provides more details later in this newsletter. News 19 Recent Meetings 21 Continues on Page 2.......... PAGE 1 VOLUME 17, NO 1, JUNE 2006 Graphics, Continues !om Page 1.... Lewis of David D. Lewis Consulting LLC. The second The section is also sponsoring a continuing education centers on Monte Carlo integration and optimization course, “Creating More Effective Graphs”, given by and will be conducted by Jennifer Hoeting and Geof Naomi Robbins (one of our own Council of Sections Givens from Colorado State University. I am also reps), and we are sponsoring a special poster session for looking forward to seeing the results of the Data Expo, the Data Expo competition www.amstat-online.org/ sponsored by the Section on Statistical Graphics along sections/graphics/dataexpo/ From what I have seen of with the Section on Statistical Computing and the Data Expo entries so far this will be a very Statistics and the Environment. The topic is very interesting and stimulating session. There will also be interesting, focusing on a graphical analysis of our traditional joint mixer with the Statistical geographic and atmospheric variables. Entries can be Computing section, which is always a lively event! Visit viewed in a special topic contributed poster session. the on-line program to see all that we have in store In addition to the JSM this year, the section helped www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2006/. sponsor a workshop on Fast Manifold Learning held in Winter is sinking its wet and freezing claws into New April at the College of William \& Mary. Put together Zealand right now, so I’m looking forward to a by Michael Trosset and Carey Priebe, the workshop Summer visit to Seattle! But the weather down here appeared to be a great success and brought together a will be much nicer by next February, which is when the fantastic and diverse group of people to discuss a topic Department of Statistics at The University of of increasing interest to the statistical computing Auckland will be hosting the DSC 2007 conference community. (Directions in Statistical Computing) The section is sponsoring a two travel scholarships www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/dsc-2007/. If you have never (including one targeted for a student) for the been to New Zealand, this might be a good Bioconductor conference just prior to the JSM this opportunity to give it a try! August. Also, the section is helping support the useR! Finally, looking even further ahead, our program chair- conference in Vienna on June 15-17. These are elect, Simon Urbanek will be on the lookout for ideas important activities for software developers and for invited sessions for JSM 2007. Please contact him researchers with an interest in statistical computing. I if you have any good suggestions. would like to take this opportunity to thank the current and past officers of the section for the outstanding job that they are doing and have done with the section. In particular, I would like to thank past- chairs Tim Hesterberg and Carey Priebe, who both Computing, Continues !om Page 1.... have been very helpful and fantastic resources for me, The program for the year’s JSM in Seattle, WA, is very and chair-elect John Monahan. Others include Mike exciting. We have eight invited sessions, ranging across Trosset, the current Program Chair who has put a wide array of topics including clustering, climate, together a great slate for the JSM, Program Chair-Elect human-genome studies, social relationships, massive Ed Wegman, Treasurer David Poole, and Council of datasets, machine learning, and Monte Carlo methods. Section Representatives Juana Sanchez, Vincent Carey, In addition, there is an invited session in memory of and Robert Gentleman. Leo Breiman, also focusing on machine learning. An- I would also like to acknowledge Juana Sanchez, our other session not to be missed is the topic contributed Newsletter Editor, who has been so diligent (and session where the student award winners will be incredibly patient) with putting this newsletter speaking. together. Also, Electronic Communication Liaison In addition to the fantastic slate of talks and posters at Thomas Devlin, Continuing Education Liaison John the JSM, the section is sponsoring two continuing Miller, Awards Officer Jose Pinheiro (who has done an education courses. Both of which are highly relevant incredible job during his tour as awards officer), and and focus on topics of great interest and importance. Todd Ogden, our Publication Officer who also has taken on the task of Webmaster. The first course is on text mining and is put together by David Madigan of Rutgers University and David D. Finally, I think it is clear that statistical computing is a very active field and is booming with the current PAGE 2 VOLUME 17, NO 1, JUNE 2006 climate of increasingly accessible computing resources and the every increasing numbers of large, complex, and interesting data problems. The section is Featured Article constantly on the look out for ways to continue to SOME MAJORIZATION TECHNIQUES support the efforts of those involved in statistical Jan de Leeuw computing. If anybody has any ideas are suggestions, in University of California, Los Angeles particular ideas involving the support and development [email protected] of students, please let me know. http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu Editorial Note 1. Introduction This issue of the newsletter features three articles. Jan Majorization algorithms (Deleeuw, 1994; Heiser, 1995, De Leeuw tells us about generalizations of the EM Lange et al., 2000) are used with increasing frequency algorithm. Michael Lawrence and Duncan Temple in statistical computation. They generalize the EM Lang describe a new R package for writing GUIs, that algorithm to a much broader class of problems and is portable across platforms. Ivo Dinov reports on his they can usually be tailored to handle very high- teaching software, Statistical Online Computational dimensional problems. Resource, SOCR. Thanks to these authors for their contributions. It would be helpful to have more con- The general idea is simple. If we want to minimize f n tributed articles, so please consider contributing your over X ⊆ R , we construct a majorization function g on work. X × X such that The News section is loaded with information about f (x) ≤ g(x,y) ∀x,y ∈ X the upcoming JSM ‘06 in Seattle. Michael Trosset € f (x) g(x,y) x X details the Statistical Computing program and Juergen€ = ∀ ∈ Symanzik highlights the Graphics program. Don’t for- get to attend the Joint Computing and Graphics Mixer Thus g, considered as a function of x is never below f on Monday starting at 7:30pm. There are always good and touches f at y. conversations, food, drinks and lots of door prizes to € win. Summaries of two recent conferences, the Inter- The majorization algorithm corresponding with this face between Computing Science and Statistics and majorization function g updat€ es x at iteration k by Fast Manifold Learning, are provided by Yasmin Said and Michael Trosset, respectively. x(k+1) ∈ argmin g(x,x(k )), x ∈X Finally, there are two informative articles about the field. Tim Hesterberg reports on computing and unless we already have graphics activities at Insightful. Robert Gould an- nounces the birth of the new free electronic Journal of € Technological Innovations in Statistics Education. An x(k) ∈ argmin g(x,x(k )), analysis of publications in the existing Journal of Sta- x ∈X tistical Education, conducted with Nathan Yau, shows in which case we stop. Convergence follows, under a need for a publication outlet for technological re- some additional simple conditions, from the sandwich search. inequality€ , which says that if we do not stop at iteration k, then Di Cook and Juana Sanchez f (x(k+1)) ≤ g(x(k +1),x(k )) < g(x(k),x(k) ) = f (x k ) Consider the example f(x)=1/4 x + 1/2 x2.

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