September/October 2011
Contents:
- Seminars, Conferences, Symposia & Call For Papers:
- Upcoming Seminars
- Info-Metrics Institute Workshop - Philosophy of Information (October 3, 2011)
- The Brad Efron Honorary Symposium on Large-Scale Inference (October 19, 2011, registration by October 10, 2011)
- 2011 Morris Hansen Lecture - October 18, 2011
Total Survey Error: Design-Based/Model-Based Viewpoints and Missing Conceptual Components. Speakers: Robert Groves and Rod Little (details will be available soon) - Analytics and the 21st Century MBA (October 21, 2011)
- SouthEast SAS® Users Group (SESUG) 19th Annual Conference (October 23-25, 2011)
- 2012 Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology Conference (January 10-12, 2012)
- 2nd ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI 2012) (January 28-30, 2012)
- Fourth International Conference on Establishment Surveys (ICES IV) (June 11-14, 2012)
- International Conference on Methods for Surveying and Enumerating Hard-to-Reach Populations (October 31-November 3, 2012)
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) International Workshop/Conference on Bayesian Theory and Applications (IWCBTA) (January 6-10, 2013)
- Classes and Workshops:
- Machine Learning (October 10 to December 16, 2011, free over the Web from Stanford University)
- The Story of the Netflix Prize Workshops Sponsored by American University
- Short Courses (includes JPSM short courses)
- Employment & Fellowship Opportunities:
- Note From The WSS NEWS Editor
- WSS People
- Newsletter pdf
Classes and Workshops
The Story of the Netflix Prize
Announcing A Joint Seminar of the Committee on National Statistics-Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CNSTAT-CATS) of the National Academies
Friday, November 4, 2011 • 3:00-5:00 pm
Reception to Follow
Keck Center of the National Academies, Room 100
500 Fifth Street NW
Washington, DC 20001
Just over five years ago, Netflix released more than 100 million movie ratings as part of a data analaysis contest to improve methods for recommending movies to customers based on ratings they had provided for previously rented movies. A prize of $1 million was offered for a "recommender" algorithms that outperformed the existing Netflix system CinematchSM by at least 10% in terms of root mean squared prediction error. In a textbook example of "crowdsourcing," more than 20,000 teams from over 150 countries submitted algorithms. By August 2009, after almost three years of effort, two teams, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos and The Ensemble, had surpassed the 10% goald in a finish worthy of its own movie.
Bob Bell (Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos) and Lester Mackey (The Ensemble) will describe the overall set-up of the competition, the challenges it prosed, the main ideas underlying their recommender algorithms, and the interaction among leading competitors. Emmanuel Candes will then discuss the research avenues stimulated by the various algorithms developed in this competition, some of the resulitnig advances, and some difficult problems that remain.
Open to the Public • Please RSVP!
For planning and bulding check-in purposes, please RSVP by October 31 to Agnes Gaskin at agaskin@nas.edu or (202) 334-3096.
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Classes and Workshops
Workshops Sponsored by American University
- Fall 2011 (October)
- Philosophy of Information, October 3, 2011, Washington DC, USA
http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/info-metrics/workshop/workshop-2011-fall.cfm
- Fall 2011 (November)
- Information Theory and Shrinkage Estimation, November 12, 2011, Washington DC, USA
http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/info-metrics/workshop/workshop-2011-november.cfm
- Spring 2012 (March)
- Information and Econometrics of Networks, March 30-31, 2012, Washington DC, USA
http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/info-metrics/workshop/workshop-2012-spring.cfm
Note From The WSS NEWS Editor
Items for publication in the November 2011 issue of the WSS NEWS will be accepted until the 15th day of the preceding month.
Email items to wss.editor@gmail.com.
Please submit all materials in MS WORD or plain text.
Return to topClick here to see the WSS Board Listing (pdf)
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