Awards and professional activities

Yehuda Koren, Bob Bell and Chris Volinsky won the $50K Netflix Progress Prize as part of the million dollar Netflix Prize challenge!

Interactive and Dynamic Graphics for Data Analysis with R and GGobi, by Di Cook and Deborah Swayne, was published in late 2007.

Bob Bell, Chris Volinsky, and Patrick Haffner won Task 1 of the 2006 KDD Cup, using a modified boosted trees algorithm to classify potential sites as pulmonary embolisms or not.

David Poole was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical Association for 2006.

Simon Urbanek was elected Program Chair-Elect of the Statistical Graphics Section of the American Statistical Association for 2006.

Deborah Swayne has been named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in recognition of her influential research in exploratory data visualization and her contributions to the ASA. (May 2005)

The paper Ensuring access to emergency services in the presence of long internet dial-up calls, by V. Ramaswami, D. Poole, S. Ahn, S. Byers & A.E. Kaplan, was a finalist for the 2004 INFORMS Wagner Prize for Excellence in O.R. Practice; it received an Honorable Mention. The paper will appear in INTERFACES.