Oakland University
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Newsletter Winter 2008
The Reality of Computer Models: Statistics and Virtual Science
On March 13 and 14, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics will co-sponsor with General Motors Research and Development Center a two-day workshop entitled “The Reality of Computer Models: Statistics and Virtual Science.” The workshop will be conducted by two leading experts in this emerging field: Professor Jerome Sacks, Director Emeritus and Senior Fellow, National Institute of Statistical Sciences, and Professor Emeritus, Duke University; and by Professor William Welch, Head of the Department of Statistics, University of British Columbia.
This workshop is particularly timely as many industries are striving to reduce development time and cost of new products by replacing physical tests with mathematical and computer simulations. However, computer models are imperfect representations of real phenomena and assessing the validity of the models requires a structure, heretofore lacking, that also accommodates the presence of calibration or tuning parameters. These demands can be met through statistical design and analysis of virtual experiments on complex computer codes. This workshop will provide a comprehensive review, with applications, of the methods, concepts and structure developed over the last two decades on this very important topic.
For more details and registration form go to http://www.math.oakland.edu/comp_model_workshop
Graduate Students
Racheal Zhang defended her PhD thesis, Analytical Characteristics of the Ridge Regression Trace, in March of 2005. Her adviser was Gary McDonald. She is currently a research intern at the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, MI.
Zhengzhi Xia defended his PhD thesis, Some Contributions to Multiple Comparison Methods for Longitudinal Data and General Linear Mixed Effects Models, in March of 2006. His advisers were Subbaiah Perla and Ravi Khattree. He is currently a Senior Research Analyst, Office of Institutional Research, Macomb Community College.
Nibedita Bandyopadhyay defended her PhD thesis, Models and Methodology for Recurrent Event Data, in October of 2006. Her advisers were Ravi Khattree and Ananda Sen. She is currently a Senior Biostatistician at Johnson and Johnson in Philadelphia.
Nart Shawash defended his PhD thesis on December 12, 2007. The thesis was titled Relationships Among Popular Interconnection Networks and their Common generalizations. His adviser was Eddie Cheng. Nart is now working for Energy Conversion Devices: Ovonics.
Dan Kirkwood defended his PhD thesis on October 16, 2007. The thesis was titled “A hybrid algorithm for the common zero problem.” His adviser was Charles Cheng.
Sujeeva Wijesiri gave a talk at the New Orleans annual meeting of AMS. She also spoke on the coding theory session at ACA ’07, and at the AMS sectional meeting at DePaul University in Chicago. Wijesiri co-authored two papers: one published by the Proceeding of the AMS titled “Codes, lattices, and their theta functions” with her adviser T. Shaska, and the another paper with Emma Previato (Boston University) and T. Shaska, published by the Albanian Journal of Mathematics.
There are 4 new teaching assistants this Fall. Kevin Pate is one of our own undergraduate students. He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in May 2007 and joined our graduate program in Fall 2007. Ariana Angjeli, originally from Albania, graduated from University of Michigan- Dearborn. Grzegorz Koscik comes from Poland. Andrew Kuhs, is one of our own graduates.
New graduate courses
With the recent renewed interest in all things Algebra, the department has created two new graduate courses in Commutative Algebra, Algebraic Geometry, and Algebraic Number Theory. We will also be offering a special topics course this spring in Constraint Logic Programming. If you’re thinking about taking some sort of “stay intellectually and mathematically alive” course and you’re in the area, you might want to give it a try.
