Announcements

Faculty Opening

Tenure-track position in statistics at the assistant professor level for fall 2010. More... 

Dialogue Lecture

Past Announcements and Events

Tuesday, December 2
7:30 pm, Hooker Auditorium

Speakers:
Andrew McLaughlin, Head of Global Public Policy and Gov't Affairs, Google, Inc. Ethan Zuckerman, Researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Co-founder of Global Voices.

Internet for the Other Five Billion, How and Why?
In 1988, the Internet was an academic curiosity, used by less than a million students and professors.  Twenty years later, it's the backbone of communication, commerce and technological innovation around the world.  It's easy to forget that most of the world still is not connected to the internet and that the internet continues to change and evolve as people from different countries, languages and cultures connect to the network.

How and when will the internet reach the five billion people not currently connected?  How will the inputs of these new users change and reshape the internet?  Who's responsible for bringing the internet to a wider world - governments?  NGOs?  private companies? - and should this be a priority for international development?  Our speakers may answer these questions differently, and our talk will be a lively and wide-ranging discussion on the cultural, political, technical and economic future of the internet.

Sponsorship:

  • Department of Mathematics and Statistics
  • Department of Computer Science
  • McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives
  • A Gift from Jean E. Sammet, MHC Class of 1948

2008 Jean E. Sammet Lecture

Tuesday, November 18
7:30 pm, L2 Cleveland Hall
Speaker: Prof. Afra Zomorodian, Dartmouth College, Department of Computer Science
Geometry of Colon Cancer
Topology of Lipid Fusion

2008 Lecture in Honor of Prof. Emeritus Lester J. Senechal

Friday Oct 17
5:00 p.m.,  305 Kendade Hall
Tea at 4:30 p.m. in Room 416 Clapp Laboratory
Our speaker was: Prof. Raji Balasubramanian, Sc.D. (MHC, '96), UMass School of Public Health
Estimating HIV Incidence based on Combined Prevalence Testing

Knowledge of incidence rates of HIV and other infectious diseases is important in evaluating the state of an epidemic as well as for designing interventional clinical trials. Estimation of disease incidence from longitudinal studies can be expensive and time-consuming.  Alternatively, Janssen et al. (1998) proposed the estimation of HIV incidence at a single point in time based on the combined use of a standard and ``detuned" antibody assay.  In this talk, this problem is framed using a maximum likelihood based approach, from which the estimator of incidence is determined and compared with the Janssen estimator.  This formulation also allows estimation for general situations, including different batteries of tests among subjects, inclusion of covariates, and a more complete evaluation of different test batteries to help guide study design.  The methods are illustrated with data from an HIV interventional trial and a seroprevalence survey recently conducted in Botswana. (This is joint work with Stephen W. Lagakos.)

This work is very applied and should be accessible to most students.  The talk will begin with motivation and examples, describe the method and conclude with a data example and further applications.