Related papers: A Conversation with James Hannan

Ingram Olkin was born on July 23, 1924 in Waterbury, Connecticut. His family moved to New York in 1934 and he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1941. He served three years in the Air Force during World War II and obtained a B.S.…

Jerome H. Friedman was born in Yreka, California, USA, on December 29, 1939. He received his high school education at Yreka High School, then spent two years at Chico State College before transferring to the University of California at…

Alan E. Gelfand was born April 17, 1945, in the Bronx, New York. He attended public grade schools and did his undergraduate work at what was then called City College of New York (CCNY, now CUNY), excelling at mathematics. He then surprised…

Myles Hollander was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 21, 1941. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1961 with a B.S. in mathematics. In the fall of 1961, he entered the Department of Statistics, Stanford University, earning…

Jon August Wellner was born in Portland, Oregon, in August 1945. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Idaho in 1968 and his PhD degree from the University of Washington in 1975. From 1975 until 1983 he was an Assistant…

Yuan Shih Chow was born in Hubei province in China, on September 1, 1924. The eldest child of a local militia and political leader, he grew up in war and turmoil. His hometown was on the front line during most of the Japanese invasion and…

Peter J. Huber was born on March 25, 1934, in Wohlen, a small town in the Swiss countryside. He obtained a diploma in mathematics in 1958 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1961, both from ETH Zurich. His thesis was in pure mathematics, but he…

Born January 11, 1921 in New York City, Monroe Sirken grew up in a suburb of Pasadena, California. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in sociology at UCLA in 1946 and 1947, and a Ph.D. in 1950 in sociology with a minor in mathematics at the…

Station-Keeping short-duration high-altitude balloons (HABs) in a region of interest is a challenging path-planning problem due to partially observable, complex, and dynamic wind flows. Deep reinforcement learning is a popular strategy for…

Weather forecasts sit upstream of high-stakes decisions in domains such as grid operations, aviation, agriculture, and emergency response. Yet forecast users often face a difficult trade-off. Many decision-relevant targets are functionals…

Born in Sydney, Australia, on April 20, 1939, Chris Heyde shifted his interest from sport to mathematics thanks to inspiration from a schoolteacher. After earning an M.Sc. degree from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. from the Australian…

During the period 1962--1964, I had a tenure track Assistant Professorship in Mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where I did research in probability theory, especially on linear diffusion processes. Being somewhat lonely…

This paper studies the Random Utility Model (RUM) in a repeated stochastic choice situation, in which the decision maker is imperfectly informed about the payoffs of each available alternative. We develop a gradient-based learning algorithm…

Hannan consistency, or no external regret, is a~key concept for learning in games. An action selection algorithm is Hannan consistent (HC) if its performance is eventually as good as selecting the~best fixed action in hindsight. If both…

We propose automatically learning probabilistic Hierarchical Task Networks (pHTNs) in order to capture a user's preferences on plans, by observing only the user's behavior. HTNs are a common choice of representation for a variety of…

We study a game puzzle that has enjoyed recent popularity among mathematicians, computer scientist, coding theorists and even the mass press. In the game, $n$ players are fitted with randomly assigned colored hats. Individual players can…

We investigate the properties of the James function, associated with Bill James's so-called "log5 method," which assigns a probability to the result of a game between two teams based on their respective winning percentages. We also…

We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…

The prediction of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), a massive tropical weather event with vast global socio-economic impacts, has been infamously difficult with physics-based weather prediction models. Here we construct a machine…

The national forecasting competition WxChallenge, brainchild of Brad Illston at the University of Oklahoma in 2005, has become a cherished institution played across the United States each year. Participants include students, faculty,…