News

• As a result of the Fall 2023 IMSI program on Algebraic Statistics, which ended in December 2023, there have been -- as of February 2024 -- over 15 preprints made available on the arXiv. One of them is a 3-chapter paper (or, a 3-section chapter?) on some challenges identified during the program. It came out of a special seminar series we called "questions and consulting seminar". For your enjoyment, here it is: arxiv2402.13961: New directions in algebraic statistics: Three challenges from 2023 

In the last quarter of a century, algebraic statistics has established itself as an expanding field which uses multilinear algebra, commutative algebra, computational algebra, geometry, and combinatorics to tackle problems in mathematical statistics. These developments have found applications in a growing number of areas, including biology, neuroscience, economics, and social sciences.
Naturally, new connections continue to be made with other areas of mathematics and statistics. This paper outlines three such connections: to statistical models used in educational testing, to a classification problem for a family of nonparametric regression models, and to phase transition phenomena under uniform sampling of contingency tables. We illustrate the motivating problems, each of which is for algebraic statistics a new direction, and demonstrate an enhancement of related methodologies.

• I was elected Program Director for the SIAM Activity Group in Algebraic Geometry for 2024-2025. 

• PhD student Miles Bakenhus received a SIAM travel grant to present at the SIAM-AG 23 conference at TU Eindhoven, Netherlands. He also spent the summer as a Givens Associate at the Argonne National Laboratory. 

• January 2023: I graciously accept this year's College of Computing Dean’s Award, "for creating and leadership of the SoReMo Initiative". Really, this award should be shared with all my fellow faculty who help make SoReMo a reality at Illinois Tech. 

• I was named one of 2022 Illinois Researchers to Know by the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition. 

• IIT Today wrote a story about my team's $2.8M grant from the DOE, closing with this quote of mine: 

"The Argonne team is working on problems different than the ones I work on, but we’ve found a new intersection point. To me, this is the essence of research, growth, and advancement of mathematics—to build new connections, expand the reach of standard methods, and blend areas to propose new creative ideas to solve problems that cannot be solved using any single method or by mathematics alone.”

• Former undergraduate research group member Jelena Mojsilović's first paper is being revised for the journal Involve! Congrats Jelena on such positive feedback on your first math paper :) I am happy to be your collaborator. The paper was accepted in late 2022. 

• PhD student Miles Bakenhus was accepted into an MRC program in summer 2022. 

• In November 2021, I was honored by the College of Computing's Excellence in Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for the "creation and leadership of the Socially Responsible Modeling, Computation, and Design (SoReMo) initiative".  

• I was the recipient of IIT's Excellence in Teaching Award for the College of Science in April 2018.

• The Center for Interdisciplinary Scientific Computation (CISC) awarded the 2018 seed grant to Lulu Kang (applied math), Mahima Saxena (psychology), and me.

• I was the recipient of the IIT College of Science teaching excellence award in December 2017.

• I was the recipient of the IIT College of Science Junior Research Excellence Award in December 2015.

• As of 2015, I am an Elected Member of the ISI.

• My PhD student Dane Wilburne spent summer 2015 visiting ISM in Tokyo with the award from the NSF-EAPSI program. He has also received a SIAM Student Travel Award to attend the SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry AG17 at Georgia Tech, summer 2017.

• Information about the DARPA GRAPHS program - my contributions and two research grants are listed under Penn State and IIT entries.

• Since 2020, I am a Managing Editor of Algebraic Statistics, the new community-run journal in the field with MSC-2020 code 62R01! More on  community homepage. 

• Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany features my profile as a co-organizer of the Summer School on Randomness and Learning in Non-linear Algebra in July 2019.

• I taught two short courses in summer schools in 2018.

• In 2016, AMS sponsored a Mathematics research community on algebraic statistics. It is a one-week summer program for graduate students and postdocs/early-career faculty within 2-3 years of their PhD. I lead the Network Models Working group. 

• Illinois Tech hosted and sponsored Journal of Algebraic Statistics from 2015 until end of 2019, when it was discontinued.

• Illinois Tech hosted a conference on algebraic statistics May 19-22, 2014. Page 11 of CoS Magazine talks about the conference; the image on the cover page is the as2014 conference logo.

• Nonlinear algebra and statistics (NLASTATS) seminar at Illinois Tech started in Fall 2019! Find some of the upcoming and past talks here.