DG Update: December 2003

1. PUBLICATIONS. Nearing completion:

S. Gomatam, A. F. Karr and A. P. Sanil (2003). "Data swapping as a decision problem." To be submitted to the Journal of Official Statistics.

A. F. Karr, X. Lin, J. P. Reiter and A. P. Sanil (2004). "Secure regression on distributed databases."

Copies of all are, or will soon be, available on the NISS web site, at

http://www.niss.org/dgii/techreports.html

2. PRESENTATIONS

At the ARCC Workshop on Computational Algebraic Statistics (Palo Alto, CA, December 14-18, 2003):

Stephen E. Fienberg: "Characterizing Distributions and Making Inferences for Contingency Tables"

Alessandro Rinaldo: "Non existence of the MLE for the model of no-K-factor-effect"

Aleksandra Slavkovic: "Tabular Data: Releases of Conditionals and Marginals"

An ongoing workshop web page will be maintained at

http://www.aimath.org/WWN/compalgstat/

Other Presentations

Stephen E. Fienberg:

December 1: "Loglinear models and algebraic geometry: Old wine in new bottles?" Laboratoire de Statistique et Probabilite, Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France.

December 11: "Characterizing distributions and making inferences for contingency tables," Department of Mathematics, University of California Berkeley.

December 30: "Characterizing probability distributions associated with multiway contingency tables," 5th Triennial International Conference on Probability and Statistics, University of Calcutta, Calcutta India.

December 31: "Characterizing probability distributions associated with multiway contingency tables," Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta India.

On December 9, Mario Trottini defended his dissertation on decision theoretic approaches to disclosure limitation in the Department of statistics at CMU. A copy will be available on the project web site shortly.

4. DATA SWAPPING TOOLKIT. Reminder: the recently released NISS Data Swapping Toolkit (DSTK) is available for download on the NISS web site, at

http://www.niss.org/software/dstk.html

5. DIRECTOR'S REPORT: My report for 2003 as Director of NISS is available at

http://www.niss.org/reports/dir200310-short.pdf

6. POSTDOCTORAL APPOINTMENTS. NISS has project needs and funds to make at least two postdoctoral appointments between now and next summer. Areas include digital government, software engineering, Web site analysis and bioinformatics. As happened this year, involvement with SAMSI programs is possible. Please make students and young colleagues aware of these wonderful opportunities. Information and a downloadable announcement are available on the NISS Web site, at

http://www.niss.org/postdoc_info.html

7. NISS NEWSLETTER. The January 2004 issue of the NISS Newsletter (Volume 4, Number 3) will be available next week on the NISS web site, at

http://www.niss.org/newsletter.html

8. HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

This page updated on January 5, 2004 2:37 PM