Proposal Writing Workshop STEW 214
January 30, 2008 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Peter Dunn (Associate Vice Provost of Research, Director of University Research
Administration & Compliance) will provide tips, advice, and instruction on how to
write grants for funding.

Applying for Federal Jobs PFEN 103
January 30, 2008 12:00am – 1:00pm
The federal government employs personnel from a wide range of backgrounds. Learn more
about the types of jobs available, how to find them, and how to apply
successfully.

Trekking Through Graduate School KRAN G007
January 31, 2008 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Learn how to develop important skills that will get you through graduate school on
top. Also learn about the resources available at Purdue and the surrounding area to
help you push on as well as relieve your stress.

Speed Networking PFEN 103
February 1, 2008 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Networking is essential to your professional development. This is a great chance to
meet your peers and develop this necessary skill!

Register at: http://www.gradschool.purdue.edu/development/

Thesis Formatting and Deposit Workshop
Location: STEW 302
Date: January 24, 2008
Time: 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Description: One of four identical presentations for Master’s and Ph.D.
candidates planning to deposit theses and dissertations in the near
future. Representatives from Boiler Copy Maker and Graduate School
Student Records will also provide short presentations and answer
questions. Bring a copy of your thesis or dissertation!

Resume Development
Location: PFEN 103
Date: January 24, 2008
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Description: Your resume is the first impression an employer in industry
will receive. Bring your latest draft and learn some tips and techniques
for tailoring the resume to fit the job and presenting yourself in the
best possible way. You’ll learn to identify and document your
transferable skills, interpret job announcements and plan your resume
accordingly, and develop a successful resume. This will be in
conjunction with the Center for Career Opportunities (CCO).

Please register at this link:
https://ias.itap.purdue.edu/rgs/wgb_workshop.disp_online_workshop

June 20-22, 2008

Bayesian Clinical Trials

Presented by Dr. Scott M. Berry, Berry Consultants, College Station, TX

The course will describe recent Bayesian innovations in the design and
analysis of clinical trials. The goals are (i) more efficient clinical
trials and clinical development programs and (ii) treating patients more
effectively, both those in and outside of trials. The presenter will
provide some background on Bayesian designs for clinical trials and give
several case studies of the adaptive approach used in actual designs and
analyses presented to the FDA. These examples include the possibility of
early stopping, seamless phase II and III trials with sequential
sampling, and using early endpoints to guide sample size and adaptive
dose finding. The cost savings of such an approach are usually
substantial. The only prerequisite knowledge necessary is a basic
understanding of statistics and of clinical trials.

Workshop sessions will be held all day Wednesday and Thursday and on
Friday morning. The Summer Institute will begin with a Tuesday afternoon
golf tournament. Thursday evening we will have our traditional barbecue.

Registration Information

To register for Summer Institute, please contact the Statistics
Department by phone at (801) 422-4505 or by email at kathi_carter@byu.edu.

Costs are as follows:

For non-academic registration,

$700 *by* 1 May 2008
$850 *after* 1 May 2008

For academic registration,

$450 *by* 1 May 2008
$600 *after* 1 May 2008

For CES and Student Rates, please contact the department at (801) 422-4505.

Scott D. Grimshaw
Professor & Associate Chair
BYU Statistics

This spring the meeting will be at St. Mary’s College in South Bend
on March 28-29. We would like to encourage graduate students once
again to come to the meeting and give talks. Even graduate students
who are not very far in their research are encouraged to give talks
that would be overviews of their areas and of interest to the wide
audience of both students (undergraduate as well as graduate) and
faculty.

Please follow this link, MAA SPring 2008, for more information and to
register.

As a new faculty member in statistics and CS, I am looking for motivated graduate students who are interested in statistical machine learning, or bioinformatics, or other millions of applications of machine learning (e.g., information extraction, finance & economics, computer vision, etc). I plan to work with students in the spring semester by offering them independent study courses. RA positions are available later based on the class project performance. In addition, RA positions, starting from the spring semester, may be available to students with outstanding record and matched research experience.

Specific research topics of my group include
1) Machine learning:
statistical inference and learning on graphical models, nonparametric Bayesian approaches, approximate inference for large-scale problems, social network modeling, learning with high-dimensional or massive data (e.g. biological datasets), etc.

2) Computational/systems biology:
learning regulatory networks, modeling metabolic pathways, evolution models of biological sequences and networks, RNA structure prediction, etc.

3) Other applications of machine learning:
biomedical imaging data analysis, web document (e.g. blogs) modeling, learning methods for material science or chemistry, etc.

If you are interested in machine learning or computational biology or if you are looking for exciting research projects, send me an email with your CV or resume and tell me what your research interest is. Due to my busy schedule, I might not be able to reply all the emails. Students with solid background in machine learning, probability, stochastic processes, linear algebra, optimization, or bioinformatics, are especially welcome!

Kind regards,

Alan Qi

P.S. 1: I will have an information session for interested students on Nov 27 afternoon 6pm. I will describe both research opportunities in my group and courses I plan to teach in 2008. Free pizza will be available on the first-come-first-serve basis. Another announcement about this information session will be sent out sometime next week; but please mark your calendar now.

P.S. 2: for your information, here is a short biography of mine: Yuan (Alan) Qi received the Ph.D. degree from the MIT Media Laboratory in 2005 and worked as a postdoctoral associate at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He joined Purdue as an assistant professor in departments of computer science and statistics in 2007. He also holds a courtesy faculty position in biology. His main research interests include statistical machine learning and computational biology.

His work has led to publications in the top journals and conferences in machine learning, computational biology, computer vision, and wireless communications, including Nature Biotechnology, Journal of Machine Learning Research, Bioinformatics, PLos Computational Biology, Neural Information Processing Systems, International Conference on Machine
Learning, IEEE conference on Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition, IEEE Trans. Wireless Communication, and IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging. He has a patent with Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. His collaborative research projects have been reported by MIT news, Washington Post, United Press International, and Xinhua News agency.

Applications from highly qualified candidates are invited for a full
postdoctoral fellow position in Mathematical Biology (one to three year(s)
depending on funding). The goal is to coordinate the cancer and
angiogenesis modelling research in our group in close contact with
medical and experimental  partners.

The successful candidate will conduct her or his research complementing
existing projects utilizing a broad spectrum of theoretical tools with a
focus on multi-scale modelling of spatio-temporal pattern formation.

The ideal candidate holds a Ph.D. in physics, mathematics or biology (or
similar), has demonstrated expertise in mathematical biology, network
analysis and stochastic methods and has an interest in molecular cell
biology and biophysics. Strong communication skills are important for
the close collaborations with experimentalists and medical doctors.

The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing,
Technical University of Dresden, Germany, hosts a department focusing on
the mathematical modelling of biological systems (head: Andreas
Deutsch), in which the envisaged research will be conducted. Dresden
campus offers a multidisciplinary research landscape unique in Europe.
The city of Dresden is situated in the Elbe valley that is also rich in
culture and impressive scenery.

The position is available immediately. Deadline for applications (by
email, including two letters of recommendation): November 15, 2007.

Contact:
Andreas Deutsch, andreas.deutsch@tu-dresden.de
and for general information:
http://rcswww.zih.tu-dresden.de/~imc