Recently, Statistical Computation Branch of American Statistical Association (ASA) published the list of winners of the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award 2018. Xiao Nan, a Ph.D. student at the School of Mathematics and Statistics of CSU won the award for his software works “liftr” and was invited to make a presentation at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) to be held in Vancouver, Canada in July this year. He is the second Chinese university student to win the award since it was established in 2000.

Xiao Nan graduated with her Bachelor’s degree from the School of Mathematics and Statistics of CSU in 2012 and is now a Ph.D. student in Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. He is now studying with Prof. Xu Qingsong in statistical machine learning, high dimensional data analysis and reproducible research. Xiao Nan has developed more than 10 popular R-language software packages which have been downloaded over 30,000 times per month. He proposed for the first time in the award-winning software “liftr” the concept of “persistent and reproducible” and aimed at tackling the reproducible research problems in large-scale statistical computation with the help of containerization technologies. This software extends the R Markdown metadata format which is popular in the fields of Statistics and Data Science and realizes containerization and rendering of R Markdown documents, thus helping generate persistent and reproducible reports across computing environments.

P.S.: About the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award

John M. Chambers, a statistician of Bell Laboratory, was granted the Software System Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his leading role in the design and development of S language. He donated all his prize money to the Statistical Computation Branch of American Statistical Association (ASA) and established the John M. Chambers Software Award to encourage undergraduates and postgraduates worldwide to write excellent statistical software. The list of award winners has been published annually since 2000 and the winners will be invited to make a presentation and receive certificates and bonus at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), the largest annual meeting in the field of statistics.

(Link: http://stat-computing.org/awards/jmc/index.html )

Source: School of Mathematics and Statistics