UGA Statistics Industry Day 2026 - Featuring Shan Ba

Lunch Lecture:

From Classical DOE to Online Experimentation at Scale: Challenges, Lessons, and Opportunities

Controlled experiments are widely regarded as the gold standard for establishing causal relationships and guiding decision-making. While the core principles of Design of Experiments (DOE) remain fundamental, applying them at the scale of modern online platforms introduces new challenges and opportunities.

Type of Event:

Dr. Yuan Ke Joins JASA Editorial Board

Dr. Yuan Ke has recently accepted a role as Associate Editor for the Theory and Methods section of Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA). JASA is the flagship journal of the American Statistics Association and one of the very top research publications in statistics and data science.
 
Congratulations to Dr. Ke for being named to this prestigious position, which reflects his stature as one of the elite researchers in our discipline! 

Forrest (Roy) Wilkes Receives a Summer 2026 CURO Research Award

Forrest (Roy) Wilkes has been awarded a Summer 2026 CURO Research Award to pursue research in Bayesian Ranking and Optimization under the guidance of Dr. Abhyuday Mandal. His work focuses on developing statistical methods that improve the reliability of rankings derived from limited or noisy data by explicitly incorporating uncertainty through Bayesian modeling. In particular, he will construct a double stochastic rank matrix and develop an R package to implement these methods.

Department of Statistics Hosts 2026 ASA DataFest

Each year, the American Statistical Association (ASA) sponsors a two-day data science competition and "celebration of data" known as ASA DataFest

Founded in 2011 at UCLA, this event has grown dramatically, expanding to many host institutions across the country each spring. While the UGA Department of Statistics has participated in ASA DataFest in the past, 2026 was the first time the department has hosted the event. And we went all in!