News from ACEMS

This is a wonderful article in the New York Times about Ruby Payne-Scott, the mother of ACEMS' inaugural director Peter Hall.

Citizen scientists from around Australia are helping scientists and reef managers get a much better picture of the health of the Great Barrier Reef, thanks to the Virtual Reef Diver project.

QUT has signed a major new project agreement with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), as the organisations focus on the use of big data and powerful technology to keep Australia at the cutting-edge of statistical analysis. The project will be undertaken in association with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS).

The Australian Institute of Policy and Science (AIPS) has just named ACEMS Associate Investigator Dr Lewis Mitchell as a South Australian Tall Poppy Science Award winner.

Until now, there has been a lot of literature in mathematics and physics on the Tracy-Widom distribution for a system with one type of particle, like a single gas or fluid.

But for the first ever, ACEMS Chief Investigator Jan de Gier and PhD Student Zeying Chen from The University of Melbourne, along with two colleagues from Tokyo, are now able to describe a mixed system where you have two families of particles. For example, a system that involves a gas or fluid mixture with two different types of molecules. Their solution was just published as a highlight in Physical Review Letters, one of the most prestigious journals in Physics.

A team of ACEMS researchers have recently proposed a novel method to speed up MCMC algorithms in big data problems. Their research has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

ACEMS Researchers will help lead a 5-day United Nations Workshop on helping countries obtain and use the vast amount of free data coming from satellite imagery so those countries can make better-informed decisions.

ACEMS Associate Investigator Adrian Barnett and ACEMS Deputy Director Scott Sisson co-wrote an article in The Conversation talking about opinion polls and sample size, looking at the question, "how big does the survey need to be to convince us it's accurate?"

ACEMS PhD student Tea Uggen was selected by the International Biometric Society (IBS) to represent the Australasia region at this year’s Young Statistician Student Showcase at the 2018 International Biometric Conference (IBC 2018) in Barcelona, Spain in July. She is only one of five students from around the world selected for this honour.