Ramdas Named to Leadership Academy
By Stacy Kish
Aaditya Ramdas, assistant professor in the Statistics & Data Science and Machine Learning departments at Carnegie Mellon University, has earned a place in the inaugural cohort of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Leadership Academy.
Ramdas was elected “for significant contributions to sequential nonparametric inference, uncertainty quantification in machine learning and statistical methods for reproducibility, as well as the development of an array of unique courses and tutorials, along with extensive mentorship and outreach activities.”
“It's an honor to be part of such a diverse cohort with a wide range of expertise,” said Ramdas.
“I would like to start conversations on broadening our borders as a field, expanding what counts as ‘statistics and data science’.”
Ramdas’s work focuses on how to use statistical methods that improve reproducibility in large-scale scientific studies, as well as how to avoid making false discoveries while testing tens of thousands of hypotheses. His work also tackles how to quantify prediction uncertainty for black box machine learning algorithms, and sequentially improve estimates of quantities on observing an increasing amount of data.
Beyond his work, Ramdas believes the COPSS Leadership Academy provides early career scientists like himself an opportunity to make a positive contribution to his field.
“The explosion of statistics, data science and machine learning offers an opportunity to expand the range of skills of Ph.D. students that we admit and graduate, diversifying the kinds of graduate courses that are offered,” he said. “I would also like to borrow lessons that our discipline can learn from neighboring, younger, fields.”
Ramdas points to the creative approaches that other organizations use in terms of conferences and journals to manage in influx of papers more effectively while maintaining the quality of the work published.
COPSS is a high-profile international organization in the fields of statistics and data science.
The Leadership Academy was created to recognize “the increasingly important role that early career statistical scientists are playing in shaping the future of the discipline. The award is designed both to call attention to the efforts of these individuals and to provide a mechanism for them to share their vision for the field with each other and the statistical community.”