Droughts, high temperatures and strong winds are key causes of the recent bushfires that have touched a major part of the Australian territory. Such extreme events seem to appear with increasing frequency, creating an urgent need to better understand the behavior of extreme environmental phenomena.

2019 Statistics and Data Science Workshop confirmed speakers include Prof. Alexander Aue, University of California Davis, USA, Prof. Francois Bachoc, University Toulouse 3, France, Prof. Rosa M. Crujeiras Casais, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Prof. Emanuele Giorgi, Lancaster University, UK, Prof. Jeremy Heng, ESSEC Asia-Pacific, Singapore, Prof. Birgir Hrafnkelsson, University of Iceland, Iceland, Prof. Ajay Jasra, KAUST, Saudi Arabia, Prof. Emtiyaz Khan, RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, Japan, Prof. Robert Krafty, University of Pittsburgh, USA, Prof. Guido Kuersteiner, University of Maryland, USA, Prof. Paula Moraga, University of Bath, UK, Prof. Tadeusz Patzek, KAUST, Saudi Arabia, Prof. Brian Reich, North Carolina State University, USA, Prof. Dag Tjostheim, University Bergen, Norway, Prof. Xiangliang Zhang, KAUST, Saudi Arabia, Sylvia Rose Esterby, University of British Colombia, Canada, Prof. Abdel El-Shaarawi, Retired Professor at the National Water Research Institute, Canada. View Workshop schedule and abstracts here.

Extreme environmental events such as droughts, floods and heat-waves take place in space and time, and it is necessary to take this into account when evaluating their risks and estimating their probabilities.  During this seminar, I will review some classical and more recent work on this topic, focusing on the modeling of univariate and spatial extremes. The ideas will be illustrated by applications to peak river flow data from the UK, and heavy rainfall close to Jeddah.

Different scientific branches have the potential to develop topics which would provide visibility and fame. However, comparable if not greater milestones can be achieved when researchers from totally different fields join their efforts. This seminar will summarize the scientific journey of a former member of KAUST, which spent three years here as a postdoc in statistics coming from a pure geological background, combining the best out of the two worlds. Examples of the latest researches will be provided in the context of space, time and space-time statistics, bridging it with the underlying geoscientific research questions.

I will highlight the main contributions in the field of coded cooperative communications, where at first a study on the performance analysis of network-coded distributed coding schemes with different strategies for handling the relay-error propagation problem will be presented. Furthermore, a study proposing a relay selection scheme based on network-coded soft information relaying will be presented. The introducing of the Rayleigh-Gaussian model, which is applied to the forwarded relay soft symbols, have shown ability to give better performance in dealing with error propagation, and allowed us to give a tractable performance analysis of network-coded schemes under Rayleigh fading channels.

Extreme value theory (EVT) deals with the asymptotic distributions of the extremes (maximum or minimum) of a set of N random variables, as N grows large. EVT is a powerful tool to analyze the performance of generalized user selection in modern wireless Communication systems. In this talk, we will provide an overview of EVT and its application to the performance of generalized user selection for multiuser traditional wireless and cognitive radio networks.