Alan F. Karr

Alan F. Karr
NISS Position: 
Director Emeritus
Personal Website: 
Temple University, Fox School of Business, Deparment of Statistics Operations And Data Science

Alan F. Karr is Principal of AFK Analytics, LLC and is Professor of Research in the Department of Statistics, Operations, and Data Science and Managing Director of the Data Science Institute at Temple University. He is also Senior Research Data Scientist at the Fraunhofer USA Center Mid-Atlantic, Principal of AFK Analytics, LLC, and Director Emeritus of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS). Previously, he was Director of the Center of Excellence for Complex Data Analysis (CoDA) at RTI International, Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Director of NISS, Professor of Statistics & Operations Research and Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a founding Associate Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute. Prior to moving to North Carolina in 1992, he was a tenured faculty member, chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and Associate Dean of the School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University.

He holds one patent, and is the author of three books and more than 160 scientific papers, the majority of which have co-authors from disciplines other than statistics. Karr is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, and has served on numerous editorial boards, as well as multiple study panels convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Karr’s research centers on cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations involving statistics and other fields that include software engineering, metagenomics, transportation, data integration, data quality, data confidentiality, data availability, survey methodology, education statistics, healthcare, aging, the scientific workforce, disease surveillance, and materials science. He has mentored more than 50 postdoctoral fellows.

NISS Research Projects

Technical Reports

  • Workshop Report: Workshop on Statistics and Information Technology (2001) -
  • Workshop Report: Affiliates Workshop on Data Quality (2001) -
  • Why Data Availability is Such a Hard Problem (2014) -
  • WEB-Based Text Visualization (1997) -
  • Water Permeability of Cracked High Strength Concrete (1998) -
  • Visualizing Software Changes (2000) -
  • Visual Scalability (2000) -
  • Variability of Travel Times on Arterial Links: Effects of Signals and Volume (2000) -
  • Variability of Travel Times on Arterial Links: Effects of Signals and Volume (1998) -
  • Title IX Data Collection: Technical Manual for Developing the User's Guide (2005) -
  • The World's Simplest Survey Microsimulator (WSSM) (2012) -
  • The Effect of Statistical Disclosure Limitation on Parameter Estimation for a Finite Population (2013) -
  • Table Servers: Protecting Confidentiality in Tabular Data Releases (2001) -
  • Survey Costs: Workshop Report and White Paper (2006) -
  • Statistics and Materials Science- A Report of a workshop (1994) -
  • Statistical Disclosure Limitation in the Presence of Edit Rules (2013) -
  • Statistical Analyses of Freeway Traffic Flows (2000) -
  • Software Systems for Tabular Data Releases (2002) -
  • Simultaneous Edit-Imputation for Continuous Microdata (2014) -
  • Sensitivity to Noise Variance in a Social Network Dynamics Model (2006) -
  • Secure, Privacy-Preserving Analysis of Distributed Databases (2005) -
  • Secure Statistical Analysis of Distributed Databases (2005) -
  • Secure Regression on Distributed Databases (2004) -
  • Secure Regression for Vertically Partitioned, Partially Overlapping Data (2004) -
  • Secure computation with horizontally partitioned data using adaptive regressive splines (2006) -
  • Secure Analysis of Distributed Chemical Databases without Data Integration (2005) -
  • Risk-Utility Paradigms for Statistical Disclosure Limitation:How to Think, But Not How to Act (2011) -
  • Real-Time Prediction of Incipient Congestion on Freeways from Detector Data (1998) -
  • Privacy Preserving Regression Modelling via Distributed Computation (2004) -
  • Privacy Preserving Analysis of Vertically Partitioned Data Using Secure Matrix Products (2004) -
  • Preserving Confidentiality of High-dimensional Tabulated Data: Statistical and Computational Issues (2002) -
  • Predicting Fault Incidence Using Software Change History (1998) -
  • Permeability Study of Cracked Concrete (1996) -
  • Permeability of Cracked Steel Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (2001) -
  • Permeability and Healing of Cracked Concrete (1998) -
  • NISS WebSwap: A Web Service for Data Swapping (2002) -
  • Multiple Imputation of Race for Project TALENT (2014) -
  • Multiple Imputation of Missing or Faulty Values Under Linear Constraints (2013) -
  • Multinomial Logistic Regression with Data from Multi-Cohort Longitudinal Surveys (2014) -
  • Influence of Microstructure and Fracture on the Transport Properties in Cement- Based Materials (1997) -
  • Frequency of Probe Vehicle Reports and Variance of Arterial Link Travel Time Estimates (1996) -
  • Experimental Studies of the Chloride Permeability of Concrete (1998) -
  • Estimation of Propensity Scores Using Generalized Additive Model (2007) -
  • Does Code Decay? Assessing the Evidence from Change Management Data (1998) -
  • Distortion Measures for Categorical Data Swapping (2003) -
  • Disseminating Information but Protecting Confidentiality (2000) -
  • Data Swapping: A Risk-Utility Framework and Web Service Implementation (2003) -
  • Data Swapping as a Decision Process (2004) -
  • Data Quality: A Statistical Perspective (2005) -
  • Data Quality: A Statistical Perspective (2002) -
  • Data Quality and Data Confidentiality for Microdata: Implications and Strategies (2004) -
  • Data Dissemination and Disclosure Limitation in a World Without Microdata: A Risk-Utility Framework for Remote Access Analysis Servers (2004) -
  • Construction of Full Sample and Replicate Weights for Project Talent, with Applications (2014) -
  • Computer Intrusion: Detecting Masquerades (1999) -
  • Combining Cohorts in Longitudinal Surveys (2011) -
  • Classification of Partially Observed Data with Association Trees (2006) -
  • Bayesian Multiscale Multiple Imputation with Implications to Data Confidentiality (2010) -
  • Bayesian Methodology for Spatio-Temporal Syndromic Surveillance (2010) -
  • Analysis of Probe-Based Information on Signalized Arterials (1996) -
  • A Spatio-Temporal Absorbing State Model for Disease and Syndromic Surveillance (2010) -
  • A Risk-Utility Framework for Categorical Data Swapping (2003) -
  • A Model for Relating Browser Behavior to Site Design on the World Wide Web (2004) -
  • A Framework for Evaluating the Utility of Data Altered to Protect Confidentiality (2006) -
  • A Class of Experimental Design for Estimating a Response Surface and Variance Components (1998) -
  • A Bayesian Semiparametric Model for Small Domain Estimation, with application to the National Survey of Recent College Graduates (2016) -

Publications