This week's Statistics Seminar speaker is David Ruppert from Cornell. David is also the recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Alumni Award.
Here's a preview of the talk from Dr. Ruppert:
"Since this lecture is for a special occasion, I thought I might give a somewhat non- standard talk that reflects back on my research on splines over the last 20 years. My first work was with Ray Carroll when we introduced roughness penalties for regression splines. Shortly after this, in 1998, I spent part of a sabbatical at Harvard visiting with Matt Wand as we began work on the book Semiparametric Regression. We were not the first to note that a roughness penalty could be implemented as a linear mixed model, but we may have been the first to realize the full potential of this idea and it became a major theme of this book. Since then my colleagues, students, and I have been working on the asymptotic theory, applications, and algorithms for spline models. This talk will provide an overview of this work and the contributions of others. It was during the time that mixed models for splines were being developed that R became the dominant statistical language and software for MCMC was introduced. Modern software tools enable the use of splines in highly complex statistical models."
An award ceremony and reception in 403 Physical Sciences will follow the talk.