Eminent speakers confirmed for International Statistical Institute conference in April! , Feb 2005

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MEDIA RELEASE

February 18, 2005
Embargoed 11:30am (AEST)
19/2005

Eminent speakers confirmed for International Statistical Institute conference in April!

Renowned mathematical biologist Lord Robert May and econometrician Sir Clive Granger have been confirmed as key speakers at the 2005 Session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) scheduled for Sydney next April 5-12.

Lord May, an Australian by birth, obtained his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Sydney in 1959 at the age of 23. He is a world authority on mathematical biology.

In 2000, he was appointed for five years as President of the Royal Society of London, a position with a rich tradition and one of the most esteemed in the world of science. That followed a five-year appointment as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government and Head of the Office of Science and Technology, playing an influential role in national scientific affairs.

Lord May holds a Royal Society Professorship jointly in the Department of Zoology, Oxford University, and at Imperial College, London, and is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

In January this year he was named winner of the inaugural Australian in the UK award. The award, introduced by the Australia Day Foundation in Britain, aims to recognise the achievements and contributions of the thousands of Australian expatriates living in Britain.

Sir Clive shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Robert Engle for their discoveries in the analysis of time series data. The work has fundamentally changed the way that economists think about financial and macro-economic data and has led to significant breakthroughs in statistics and macro-economic forecasting.

Sir Clive is also noted for developing a formal statistical notion of causality based on which variables help to predict other variables. His discovery is widely used and is commonly known as "Granger causality". He is now Professor Emeritus at University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Presentations at the ISI session and its associated meetings and short courses will cover all significant areas of statistics. Special theme days, with cutting edge presentations and papers, are being organised for those with interests in finance and statistics, environmental statistics and genomics.

This will be the second time that the ISI session has been held in Australia. It was last held in Sydney in 1967. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is the host organiser of the session.

Further information about the ISI, including details of registration and satellite conferences can be found at www.tourhosts.com.au/isi2005