Related papers: A Conversation with Shayle R. Searle
In this paper we retrace the recent history of statistics by analyzing all the papers published in five prestigious statistical journals since 1970, namely: Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical Association,…
Most prior work in the sequence-to-sequence paradigm focused on datasets with input sequence lengths in the hundreds of tokens due to the computational constraints of common RNN and Transformer architectures. In this paper, we study…
In this informal report, I outline my research efforts, collaborations, and other experiences while participating in the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)'s Advanced Graduate Research Program (AGRP), aka Sabbatical, from October 2008 through…
We provide a novel approach and an exploratory study for modelling life event choices and occurrence from a probabilistic perspective through causal discovery and survival analysis. Our approach is formulated as a bi-level problem. In the…
The Research Unit in Bioinformatics at Rhodes University (RUBi), South Africa offers a Masters of Science in Bioinformatics. Growing demand for Bioinformatics qualifications results in applications from across Africa. Courses aim to bridge…
With the advent of Transformers, large language models (LLMs) have saturated well-known NLP benchmarks and leaderboards with high aggregate performance. However, many times these models systematically fail on tail data or rare groups not…
We consider the problem of learning from sparse and underspecified rewards, where an agent receives a complex input, such as a natural language instruction, and needs to generate a complex response, such as an action sequence, while only…
Causality plays a central role in understanding interactions between variables in complex systems. These systems often exhibit state-dependent causal relationships, where both the strength and direction of causality vary with the value of…
General purpose Search Engines (SEs) crawl all domains (e.g., Sports, News, Entertainment) of the Web, but sometimes the informational need of a query is restricted to a particular domain (e.g., Medical). We leverage the work of SEs as part…
Computer science has grown rapidly since its inception in the 1950s and the pioneers in the field are celebrated annually by the A.M. Turing Award. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on the path to influential computer scientists by…
Multivariate statistical analysis is concerned with observations on several variables which are thought to possess some degree of inter-dependence. Driven by problems in genetics and the social sciences, it first flowered in the earlier…
Citizen science is a powerful analysis tool, capable of processing large amounts of data in a very short time. To bridge the gap between classification data products from web-based citizen science platforms to statistically robust signal…
Transfer learning that adapts a model trained on data-rich sources to low-resource targets has been widely applied in natural language processing (NLP). However, when training a transfer model over multiple sources, not every source is…
This paper shows that sequential statistical analysis techniques can be generalised to the problem of selecting between alternative forecasting methods using scoring rules. A return to basic principles is necessary in order to show that…
Since transition to higher education emerged as a research topic in the early 1970s, scholarly inquiry has focused on students without impairments and, what is more, little attention has been paid to the role of digital technologies. This…
An evolving problem in the field of spatial and ecological statistics is that of preferential sampling, where biases may be present due to a relationship between sample data locations and a response of interest. This field of research bears…
Reinforcement learning is critical to improving large reasoning models, but its success relies heavily on verifiable rewards (RLVR), making it hard to use in open-ended domains where correctness is ambiguous and cannot be verified.…
STEM dropout rates remain high at universities, particularly in computer science programs with theory-intensive courses. Digital learning environments now capture rich behavioral data that could help identify struggling students early, yet…
This textbook compiles the lecture notes from security courses taught at Oxford in the 2000s, at Royal Holloway in the 2010s, and currently in Hawaii. The early chapters are suitable for a first course in security. The middle chapters have…
Academic meritocracy is jeopardized by systematic imbalances; for example, whereas Black and Hispanic individuals constitute over 30% of the U.S. population, they represent fewer than 10% of tenured academics in science and engineering.…