The Ihaka Lectures for 2021! The speakers are all local, because quarantine and borders and so on, and wonderful because just because.
- Dr Simon Urbanek is a member of R Core and has been on the academic staff in the Statistics department since just before the borders were closed last year. He’s talking about infrastructure for distributed statistical computing.
- Prof Rhema Vaithianathan is a health economist and is Director of the Centre for Social Data Analytics at AUT. She was going to talk in our Ihaka Lecture series last year, which emphasised social science and policy uses of statistical computing. She has agreed to talk on the same topic this year: using machine learning to support high-stakes decisions in child welfare.
- Dr Rachelle Binny works at Manaaki Whenua– Landcare Research and is a Principal Investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini. She is an applied mathematician who used to primarily work on problems in biology and biodiversity, but who has become involved with New Zealand’s Covid response over the past year.
As usual, the talks are on Wednesday evenings in March: March 10, 17, and 24. The talks are all whatever the opposite of virtual is, at 6:30pm in Building 423 at the University of Auckland (22 Symonds St, next to Engineering and opposite the Science buildings). They will also be streamed over the internet and recorded for Youtube.
Earo Wang came up with the poster/t-shirt design, which is based on a hexmap of Regional Council areas for NZ, originally from the DHBins package.