Department of Statistical Science

Dr Gareth Peters is a co-investigator on a successful three year joint research grant proposal with Professor Tomoko Matsui from the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo, Professor Kazuya Takeda from Nagoya University and Professor Konstantin Markov from the University of Aizu. Funding has been awarded from 2013 to 2016 and is provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under the KAKENHI grant scheme. The project will grow and strengthen research collaboration between UCL and several Japanese institutes.

Applications are invited for a fully-funded PhD studentship to conduct research in a branch of probability or statistics, commencing in September 2013. This funding is provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Professor Patrick Wolfe has been awarded a senior research fellowship in the mathematical sciences from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, entitled "Statistical Theory and Methods to Transform our Understanding of Network Data".  It will provide support for his work in statistical modelling and inference for graphs and networks over the next 5 years.  Postdoctoral positions will be advertised shortly.

Dr Christian Hennig has been invited by the president of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS), Iven van Mechelen, to give a presentation on "Measurement of quality in cluster analysis" in the president's invited session at the IFCS 2013 conference in Tilburg, the Netherlands, 15-17 July. Dr Hennig will give further invited presentations on the same topic at the Summer Working Group on Mixture Models, Bologna, 22-26 July and the ISI conference in Hong Kong, 26-30 August. Dr Hennig has also been invited to speak at the ERCIM conference 2013 in London, 14-16 December (title to be announced).

Dr Christian Hennig has been awarded an EPSRC standard research grant for work on "A multicriterion approach to cluster validation".  In this research, Dr Hennig will look at the notoriously difficult problem of estimating the number of clusters from a fresh angle, connecting criteria properly to different research aims. The project includes collaborations with the robust clustering group of the University of Valladolid led by Professor Carlos Matran, the expert for biological species delimitation Dr Bernhard Hausdorf (University of Hamburg), the International Federation of Classification Societies cluster benchmarking initiative led by IFCS president Professor Iven van Mechelen (KU Leuven) and Dr Hennig's former PhD student Dr Pietro Coretto (University of Salerno).