Honorary lecture - Professor Anthony Davison

Summary
Everyone’s backyards

The title is taken from John Tukey, the founder of data science, who apparently once said that `The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.’  The talk will discuss fun in a few backyards, including the modelling of rare events, which is crucial in a wide range of applications, insect behaviour, and risk analysis for satellites.  

Bio
Anthony Davison holds an MA in mathematics from the University of Oxford (1980), and and MSc (1981) and PhD (1984) in statistics from Imperial College London.  He then successively held posts at the University of Texas at Austin, Imperial College and the University of Oxford before being appointed to EPFL as professeur extraordinaire in 1996 and then as professeur ordinaire in 1999.   His research has touched on a wide range of topics in statistical theory, methods and applications, and has been recognised by fellowships of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics,  the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society, a Medallion Lecture from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a laurea honoris causa from the University of Padova.  His service to the scientific community includes editorships of series B of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (2000-2004) and Biometrika (2008-2017).