Data Collection Under Extreme Conditions
Meet the Speaker:
James J. Cochran is professor of statistics & operations research and the Mike & Kathy Mouron Research Chair with the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College, and a Research Associate with the Alabama Transportation Institute. He received his PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 1997, and he has been a Visiting Scholar with Stanford University, University of South Africa, Universidad de Talca, Pôle Universitaire Léonard De Vinci, University of Limpopo, University of Namibia, and University College London.
Dr. Cochran has published 18 book chapters, over 60 research articles, and over 100 other articles. He has taught a wide range of statistics and operations courses from the introductory undergraduate level through PhD seminars in statistics and operations research, and he is coauthor of 8 textbooks in statistics, operations research, analytics, and data visualization. He has served on the editorial boards for eighteen journals and as Editor-in-Chief of INFORMS Transactions on Education from 2007-2012.
Dr. Cochran’s research focuses on problems at the interface of statistics and operations research. He expanded the optimization paradigm from deterministic vs. stochastic to deterministic vs. stochastic vs. sample-based optimization; developed Bayesian and predictive approaches to optimization problems; crafted an approach to optimizing political platforms (establishing political engineering as a subfield of political science); and created the finitization methodology for restricting the support of a probability distribution while preserving the values of its moments.
Dr. Cochran is the founding Editor of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Wiley Series in Operations Research and Management Science, Springer Synthesis Lectures on Operations Research and Applications, and INFORMS Analytics Body of Knowledge. Dr. Cochran established an international teaching effectiveness colloquium series and has organized these events in Uruguay, South Africa, Colombia, India, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Nepal, Cameroon, Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, Fiji, Mongolia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Tunisia, Grenada, and Sri Lanka. He was a founding co-chair of Statistics without Borders and a founding committee member for the INFORMS Pro Bono Analytics initiative. He has delivered keynote addresses to conferences in thirty nations.
Dr. Cochran has received the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, Mu Sigma Rho Statistical Education Award, Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award, ASQ’s William G. Hunter Award, and Karl E. Peace Award for outstanding statistical contributions for the betterment of society. He is a three-time finalist for the Innovative Applications in Analytics Award and a finalist for the Melbourne Business School Practice Prize for Achievement in Business Analytics. He is also a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of INFORMS, and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. He has received both the American Statistical Association Founders Award and the INFORMS President’s Award (the only individual to have done so), a Scripps Howard Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award for statistical contributions to the advancement of scientific or technical knowledge.
What you can look forward to:
During this session, Dr. James Cochran will discuss difficult conditions that arose as he worked on Statistics Without Borders (SWB) projects in the Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Somalia. He will explain ways that he and his colleagues were able to work around difficulties (in widely varying degrees of success) to collect reasonably reliable and meaningful data, and he will emphasize the importance of partnering with colleagues who are familiar with the region in which the data are to be collected. Dr. Cochran will then enlighten members of the audience on how they can get involved in Statistics Without Borders.
More about Statistics Without Borders:
Statistics Without Borders (SWB) is an Outreach Group of the American Statistical Association that is composed entirely of volunteers. SWB provides free statistical consulting to organizations and government agencies, particularly from developing nations, which do not have the resources for statistical services. In support of non-partisan and secular activities, SWB promotes the use of statistics to improve the health and well-being of all people. Working in support of SWB’s mission often necessitates collection of data under alarmingly difficult conditions – war, famine, terrorism, disease, destruction, corporate corruption, despots – conditions that a formal education in statistics generally does not equip one to handle.
Questions will get answered, like:
- How does a statistician anticipate and contend with these conditions?
- What are the potential ramifications for the project, the statistician, and the data collectors?
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