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Professor Bernhard Flury, an applied statistician, was on
the faculty in the Department of Mathematics at IU's Bloomington campus for
more than ten years, starting in 1987. He did research in
Multivariate Analysis and was a popular teacher of courses
in statistics. For several years he was the director of the Statistical
Consulting Center. He was killed by a rockslide
while hiking in the Italian Alps in the summer of 1999. At
the initiative of his wife Leah, as well as Professor Walter
Gautschi (of Purdue University) and several other people, a
fund was established in the Mathematics Department to fund a series of lectures in his memory. The first
Bernhard Flury Memorial Lecture was given in the spring of
2004 by Professor Jim Schott of the University of Central
Florida. Professor Ben Boukai of IUPUI gave the second lecture
in 2006. The Department of Statistics began hosting these lectures in 2007.
Please join us for the 2009 Bernhard Flury Memorial Lecture.
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PAST Flury Lectures
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Flury Lecture - A Statistician Looks At Uncertainty
March 03, 2009 -
David Scott - Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University
Modern science relies on ever more complex models to understand data. Presenting the confidence of model predictions is a grand challenge. Faced with potentially hundreds or thousands of parameters, scientists often perform sensitivity analyses in order to assess the robustness of model predictions.
Such one-at-a-time calculations are useful but limited. Visualization techniques can provide a fuller picture, but the availability of immersive technologies is still expensive and not commonplace. We examine some simple data and discuss the presentation of uncertainty. Avenues for research are described.
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Flury Lecture - Current and Future Frontiers in Statistics
March 27, 2008 - RH 100 10am
Professor Peter Hall, University of Melbourne
The availability of powerful computing equipment has had a dramatic impact on statistical methods and thinking, changing forever the way data are analysed. New data types, larger quantities of data, and new classes of research problem are all motivating new statistical methods. We shall give examples of each of these issues, and discuss the current and future directions of frontier problems in statistics.
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Flury Lecture - Statistical Analysis of Bullet Lead Compositions as Forensic Evidence
March 08, 2007 - RH 100 4pm
Professor Karen Kafadar of the University of Colorado - Denver & Health Sciences Center
Since the 1960s, the FBI has performed Compositional Analysis of Bullet Lead (CABL), a forensic technique that compares the elemental composition of bullets found at a crime scene to that of bullets found in a suspect's possession. CABL has been used when no gun is recovered, or when bullets are too small or fragmented to compare striations on the casings with those on the gun barrel. The National Academy of Sciences formed a Committee charged with the assessment of CABL's scientific validity. The report, ``Forensic Analysis: Weighing Bullet Lead Evidence'' (National Research Council, 2004), included discussions on the effects of the manufacturing process on the validity of the comparisons, the precision and accuracy of the chemical measurement technique, and the statistical methodology used to compare two bullets and test for a ``match''.
This talk will focus on the statistical analysis: the FBI's methods of testing for a ``match'', the apparent false positive and false negative rates, the FBI's clustering algorithm (``chaining''), and the Committee's recommendations. Additional analyses on data later made available, the use of forensic evidence in general, also will be discussed.
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Indiana University | IU Bloomington |
College of Arts & Sciences | Statistics