The Annual Department Picnic will be held on Sunday, May 20, at 11:30am at Hyde Park's Promontory Point. RSVP here by Monday, May 14 to help us plan food and carpooling.

All undergrads majoring or minoring in Statistics are invited to a reception honoring graduating fourth-years, with a short talk by Professor Michael Stein, entitled "Statistics: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned," on Thursday, May 17, at 5:00pm in Eckhart 110. RSVP by Thursday, May 10 to mhj@galton.uchicago.edu.

Lectures on Uncertainty Quantification
Professors Jim Berger and Mihai Anitescu will present a series of 5 lectures on Uncertainty Quantification on Wednesdays, at 4:00 pm, in Ryerson 277, from April 25 through May 23.

Spring Quarter Student Seminars—May

May 2, 2012: Darongsae Kwon (PhD Thesis Presentation)

May 3, 2012: Rina Foygel Barber (PhD Thesis Presentation)

May 4, 2012: Lezhen Wu
(Master's Thesis Presentation)

May 7, 2012: YanQi Lin
(Master's Thesis Presentation)

May 9, 2012: Yanjue Li
(Master's Thesis Presentation)

May 10, 2012: Mengyu Xu
(Master's Thesis Presentation)

May 10, 2012: Haesung Kim
(Master's Thesis Presentation)

May 10, 2012: Jiwon Kim
(Master's Thesis Presentation)

May 15, 2012: Second-year PhD Student Seminars
(Walter Dempsey, Somak Dutta, Michael Horrell, Eric Janofsky, Dinah Shender, Miaoyan Wang, and Ruming Wang)

May 16, 2012: Ting Zhang (PhD Thesis Presentation)

May 22, 2012: First-year PhD Student Seminars
(Marc Goessling, Zhe Liu, Joelle Mbatchou, Andrew Poppick, Scott Powers, Rishideep Roy, Zhengrong Xing, Yuancheng Zhu)

May 23, 2012: Boyoung Kwak
(Master's Thesis Presentation)

The Scientific and Statistical Computing Seminars, are held at 3:30 PM on Fridays in Eckhart 133.

S. R. S. Varadhan of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University will be giving the first Patrick Billingsley Lecture on Thursday, May 31, 2012. Prof. Varadhan will speak on "Large Deviations with Applications to  Random Matrices and Random Graphs" for the Billingsley Lecture. He will also speak on "Large Deviations for an Unusual Sum" on Friday, June 1, as part of the Probability and Statistical Physics Seminar.

The 2012 Anniversary Edition of Patrick Billingsley's classic Probability and Measure has been released by publishers A John Wiley & Sons with a foreword by Professor Steve Lalley of our department.

Prof. Stephen Stigler talks to Inquiry about statistical concepts, Darwin, and the evolution of scientific ideas.

Prof. John Reinitz published his Comment "Pattern Formation" regarding Alan Turing and developmental biology in the 23 February 2012 issue of Nature, and discussed Turing's influence on his own research with UC Medical Center writer Rob Mitchum.

Rina Foygel discusses graduate student research in an interview in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Inquiry.

Prof. Dan Nicolae is co-chair of a national asthma genetics consortium that released first findings, published in Nature Genetics, identifying an asthma susceptibility gene variant specific to African-Americans.

Peter Bühlmann of ETH Zürich was the speaker for the annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures held on April 16 and 17, 2012. Thank you to Stephen and Virginia Stigler for organizing the event.

Summer Course Registration, May 14–18, 2012.

MONDAY, May 14, 2012, at 4:00 PM, in Eckhart 133, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Statistics Colloquium
STEVEN EVANS, Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley
"Metagenomics and Metrics on Spaces of Probability Measures"

TUESDAY, May 15, 2012, at 4:30 PM, in Eckhart 110, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Second-year Ph.D. Student Seminars

4:30 PM, Walter Dempsey, "Theoretical Guarantees for Sparse Approximation"
4:45 PM, Somak Dutta, "An h-likelihood Method for Agricultural Variety Trials"
5:00 PM, Michael Horrell, "Non-parametric High-dimensional Model Estimation"
5:15 PM, Eric Janofsky, "Semi-parametric ICA"
5:30 PM, Dinah Shender, "Graphical Lasso for Matrix Data"
5:45 PM, Miaoyan Wang, "Quasi-likelihood Score Testing with Related Individuals"
6:00 PM, Ruming Wang, "Modeling LETFs and Pricing Options on LETFs by Transform Method"

WEDNESDAY, May 16, 2012, at 1:00 PM, in Eckhart 110, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Ph.D. Thesis Presentation
TING ZHANG, Department of St"atistics, The University of Chicago
"Nonparametric Inference on Nonstationary Time Series"

WEDNESDAY, May 16, 2012, at 4:00 PM, in Ryerson 277, 1100 E. 58th Street.
Lectures on Uncertainty Quantification
JIM BERGER, Duke University, and the Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Lecture 4: Computer Model Discrepancies and Prediction of Reality"

THURSDAY, May 17, 2012, at 5:00 PM, in Eckhart 110, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Undergraduate Social—Reception Honoring Graduating Fourth-years
MICHAEL STEIN, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Statistics: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned."

FRIDAY, May 18, 2012, at 3:30 PM, in Eckhart 133, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Scientific and Statistical Computing Seminar
STANLEY OSHER, University of California, Los Angeles
"Applications and Implications of Fast Methods for L₁ Related Optimization"