Efron@80

A Day of Celebration in Honor of Bradley Efron's Birthday

May 24, 2018  ●  8:30am to 4:30pm (Pacific) with a Reception and Dinner to follow

Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center ● 475 Via Ortega ● Mackenzie Room 300

Closest Parking Lots

Brad Efron has been at Stanford for more than 50 years and has represented the Statistics Department, as well as leading the Mathematical and Computational Science program, for the past 30. He is best known for proposing the bootstrap resampling technique, which has had a major impact in the field of statistics and virtually every area of statistical application.

He has made seminal contributions to many areas of statistics, and his thinking has influenced many scientific disciplines including medicine, physics, astronomy, biology, economics, sociology, and computer science. More importantly, Brad always makes statistics fun, engaging, and important. This day-long celebration of our friend and colleague will bring his former students and collaborators back to the Farm for an Efron-centric series of presentations to thank him for sharing with us his kindness, generosity, irreverent humor, and encouraging spirit.

a red retro-style bicycle

Agenda & Invited Speakers

Time Activity
8:30a Continental Breakfast
9:15a Welcome – Rob Tibshirani and Trevor Hastie
9:30a

Arthur Peterson, Jr.University of Washington: "Censored data, randomized trials, and the teaching of statistics: Some contributions by Brad to science (and to me)"

10:00a Gary SimonNew York University: "Gerrymandering:  How bad is it?"
10:30a Morning Coffee Break
10:45a Ronald ThistedUniversity of Chicago: "Reproducing Shakespeare"
11:15a Abhinanda SarkarMysore Royal Academy: "Reflections on the Efron view of statistics in the modern world"
12:00n Lunch @ Sequoia Hall, Jacaranda Courtyard
1:30p Terry TherneauMayo Clinic: "Simple problems and unexpected answers"
2:00p Samuel KouHarvard University: "Optimal shrinkage estimation in heteroscedastic hierarchical models: Empirical Bayes and beyond"
2:30p Afternoon Coffee Break
3:00p Omkar MuralidharanGoogle: "Evaluating models for heterogeneous causal effects"
3:30p Stefan WagerStanford University: "Bias-aware confidence intervals for empirical Bayes estimation"
4:00p Closing Remarks

 

Brad Efron in 1998

The Bootstrap

"I had a very complicated idea called 'the combination distribution' for explaining the jackknife, but the more I worked on it the simpler it got, until I was left with what seemed like almost nothing at all. And that was the bootstrap."