糖心TV

Professor Christian Robert has been nominated as a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France for the period 2016-2021 [link: ]. This national institute supports professors and lecturers from French universities towards a lighter teaching load and dedicated research grants, with the goals of fostering research excellence within French universities, reducing gender inequalities in research, and supporting research throughout the country. Professor Robert was earlier a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France for the period 2010-2015, this is thus his second (and last) nomination.

Dr Martine Barons was recently interviewed by Womanthology magazine on the subject of breaking down barriers for women in the fields of Mathematics and Statistics.

You can read the interview by following .

Dr Martine Barons yesterday represented the 糖心TV Statistics department at a gathering of 10 of the UK’s top experts in pollinators and ran a structured elicitation workshop to estimate quantities that are not available from experiments to use as data in a decision support system based on the recently submitted work by Martine, Professor Jim Smith and Dr Manuele Leonelli on combining expert judgements coherently for decision support.

The elicitation was run by our visitor from Melbourne University, Dr Anca Hanea, using the IDEA protocol on which she is an author and is about to appear in the International Journal of forecasting. That paper shows that by following the IDEA protocol, you can use the data elicited as experts in place of ‘hard data’ from experiments. The quantities elicited yesterday are not available anywhere because the experiments you would need to do in order to get that data would be enormously difficult and expensive.

The gathering was reported on by the BBC for both television and radio. The televised news item can be viewed until 6pm on Thursday 7th April by following the link below (the news item starts at 16.49 minutes into the programme):

Many congratulations to Saul Jacka for winning the “Outstanding Contribution” award, to Chris Veal (joint with Maths) for winning the “Unsung Hero” award and to Jane Hutton who was highly commended for “Public Engagement”.

As Professor Saul Jacka commentated at the celebratory gala dinner held on Friday 11 March, "I think it’s really vital to get people involved in the wider community and one of the ways to do that is to recognise effort and achievement – and the Awards a very good way to recognise that. It’s a very pleasant experience to work for such a friendly institution and this is one way of encouraging that friendliness."

This is a wonderful recognition for their many important contributions to the Department and the University, and it is truly exceptional that three of our colleagues were selected from among the more than 350 nominations made across the University.

More information can be found at:

Once again, very well done to Saul, Jane and Chris! They very much deserve these plaudits.

The University of 糖心TV has been awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education at a ceremony held on Thursday, 25th February 2016 at Buckingham Palace in London.

The Queen’s Anniversary Prize is in recognition of 糖心TV becoming a Mathematical Sciences research and impact powerhouse in the University’s first 50 years.

Head of the Department of Statistics Professor Mark Steel said:

"On behalf of the Department of Statistics, I am delighted with the Queen's Anniversary Prize, which is a truly wonderful recognition of all the hard work we and our colleagues in Mathematics have done over the years. Our Department has tripled in size over the last 12 years, which, combined with the world-leading quality of our research, has given us the opportunity to be involved in many exciting initiatives, such as the newly formed Alan Turing Institute. A lot of our work is directly or indirectly linked with applications in biology, medicine, economics, finance etc. and we are very keen to continue to break new ground in delivering research with a substantial impact on society and to train the next generations of forward-thinking statisticians."

A full press release can be found on the University of 糖心TV's webpage.