Panel

The Science of ChatGPT

A panel of faculty experts on machine learning, language learning, neurobiology, and philosophy of mind help us understand how ChatGPT and large language models work.

Kickstart your Career: How to Maximize Those Early Years

The transition from graduate school to navigate the unknowns of the job market is challenging for every new statistician. Proper training, efficient networking, and building a professional profile are some of the early initiatives to prepare graduate students for this change. Statisticians are trained in modeling and data analysis; however, the real-world job market requires skills beyond technical knowledge, including communication, presentation, leadership, and collaborative skills, as well as pitching one’s ideas and goals, and being able to advocate for oneself. As a group of emerging statisticians, CENS would like to fill this gap and invite early-career statisticians to discuss the unique challenges that early-career statisticians might face in a new work environment and how to deal with them. Our panel includes both academic and industry statisticians at the MS and PhD level, several of whom graduated in the last five years. Their valuable insights and mentoring guidance will be useful for newly-emerging statisticians to build a path to kickstart their careers achieving their goals.

Panel Discussion: Communicating during a pandemic: what worked, what didn’t and what’s next

The Wake Forest Conference on Analytics Impact is focused on the impactful use of analytics to solve problems in business, non-profits, government agencies and society. During the pandemic, government officials and healthcare professionals have more so than ever before, had to communicate to the public using healthcare data. How to communicate these data statistically and visually to influence people’s behavior has proven very challenging. What have we learned about communicating with data during this crisis? What did we get right and what failed? This year’s Conference on Analytics Impact is focused on communicating with health care data and lessons learned from the pandemic.

Tips for Statistical Communication and Data Storytelling

Without strong communication skills, all the advanced analysis we have performed might be overrun. At this event, our expert panelists will share tips and advice on how to clearly and effectively communicate statistics, particularly in social media, and answer questions from the audience.

What is the value of the p-value?

This talk will focus on leveraging social media to communicate statistical concepts. From summarizing other’s content to promoting your own work, we will discuss best practices for effective statistical communication that simultaneously is clear, engaging, and understandable while remaining rigorous and mathematically correct. It is increasingly important for people to be able to sift through what is important and what is noise, what is evidence and what is an anecdote. This talk focuses on techniques to strike an appropriate balance, with specifics on how to communicate complex statistical concepts in an engaging manner without sacrificing truth and content.

Communicating Complex Statistical Concepts to Collaborators, Stakeholders, and the General Public

Clear statistical communication is both an educational and public health priority. This session will focus on best practices for effective statistical communication that simultaneously is clear, engaging, and understandable while remaining rigorous and mathematically correct. The panelists have a range of experience with communicating complex statistical concepts to both technical and lay audiences via multiple communication mechanisms including podcasting, Twitter, engaging with journalists in print, and television correspondence on networks such as CNN and BBC. The session will begin with moderated questions posed by the organizer and then open the discussion to audience members.

R-Ladies Panel: Improving gender diversity in a male-dominated community

R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender diversity in the R community. We are interested in presenting a panel of regional leaders in the R-Ladies movement. We will discuss topics such as diversity data in the R community, best practices for starting up a meetup in your own community, best practices for running and continued success of a meetup in your community, and funding opportunities. We will also diagnose different obstacles and discuss how we attack them, for example increasing women’s competence versus confidence versus recognition in the R community. Finally we will provide resources and details about how to get involved with local meetups.