Two weeks in the past, I had the good honour of receiving the 2012 Corcoran memorial medal and prize for my doctoral dissertation. It’s awarded by Oxford’s Division of Statistics in reminiscence of Stephen Corcoran, a pupil who died in 1996 earlier than having time to finish his DPhil. Being a Statistics prize, there may be smoothing within the award course of: it’s awarded each two years, to a DPhil which was accomplished within the final 4 years (i.e. between October 2008 and October 2012 in my case). The ceremony was a part of the Division’s twenty fifth anniversary celebrations.
Nils Lid Hjort gave a lecture on his “confidence distributions”, a strategy to signify uncertainty within the non-Bayesian framework. Though he gave examples the place his illustration appears to work finest, I puzzled how this might prolong to circumstances the place the parameter shouldn’t be unidimensional.
Chris Yau obtained the 2010 Corcoran prize and gave a brief discuss on purposes of HMMs togenetic knowledge; he was unfortunate to have his 15-minute discuss interrupted by a hearth alarm (however that allowed me to marvel at how calmly environment friendly the British are at evacuating in such conditions). Fortunately, my very own discuss suffered no such interruption.
Peter Donnelly demonstrated as soon as once more his superb lecturing expertise, with a extremely informative discuss on statistical inference of the historical past of the UK utilizing genetic knowledge.
All in all, a really pleasurable afternoon, which was adopted by a beautiful dinner at Somerville Faculty, with a number of speeches on the previous, current and way forward for Statistics at Oxford.
Thanks once more to the Corcoran committe, particularly Steffen Lauritzen, for choosing me because the prize winner!
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