Meeting notes: 2/9

We had a nice club meeting yesterday, at which we discussed upcoming things of interest.  Here are some of the highlights.  Check out the Opportunities tab for information about other things that are going on.

Officers

We're planning on electing Stat Alliance officers at our next meeting on Thursday, 2/23 at 4p.  Here are the positions we want to fill:

• President
  • Lead meetings
  • Represent club
  • Act as liaison to faculty, university, and outside speakers
• Vice president
  • Send announcements to mailing list (weekly digest?)
  • Plane events
  • Coordinate outreach with President (e.g., major fairs)
• Secretary
  • Take notes during meetings, etc.
  • Keep organized list of opportunities; be able to provide President & VP with information and ideas
  • Update calendar
• Financial officer
  • In charge of fundraising efforts & volunteer opportunities
  • Keep track of club funds to be used for field trips, speakers, etc.
• Social media officer
  • Manage website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts.

Kaggle/project

At our next meeting, we're planning to look at Kaggle's Data Science Bowl 2017.  We plan on making this an ongoing project for the semester.  It's a project using real medical imaging data to try to use statistics and machine learning to identify cancerous lesions in human lungs.  Various cash prizes are available for the top submissions.

Field trip: CO-WY chapter meeting

The CO-WY ASA chapter is meeting at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO on 4/21.  Statisticians will present work they are doing in the CO-WY area and there will be time to meet people, learn about statistics jobs, and network.  We plan on attending.

Before the chapter meeting, we also hope to meet with two NCAR statisticians: Doug Nychka and Dorit Hammerling.  They develop models and statistics to understand patterns in (climate-related) spatial datasets as well as how to use super computers to implement these methods on big spatial datasets.

NCAR also has a historic Cray 1 supercomputer on display, which is really neat to visit!