Professor Marc Genton and former postdoctoral fellow win the 2017 Wilcoxon Award

Marc Genton (pictured), KAUST distinguished professor of statistics, jointly won the 2017 Wilcoxon Award with his former postdoctoral fellow Stefano Castruccio. Photo by Meres J. Weche.

Marc Genton, KAUST distinguished professor of statistics, and his former postdoctoral fellow Stefano Castruccio, have jointly won the 2017 Wilcoxon Award for best applications paper in Technometrics. Technometrics is a journal of statistics for the Physical, Chemical and Engineering Sciences, and is published quarterly by the American Society for Quality and the American Statistical Association. The award announcement was made at the 61st Annual Fall Technical Conference (FTC) in Philadelphia from October 5 to 6, 2017.

Genton and Castruccio's paper was entitled "Compressing an ensemble with statistical models: An algorithm for global 3D spatio-temporal temperature," and appeared in Technometrics, 58, 319-328. Their paper details how, by accounting for the specific statistical structure of global climate simulation data, Genton and Castruccio developed a novel, effective data-compression scheme for large-scale climate simulations. The method discussed promises to significantly reduce data-storage requirements and accelerate the capacity for climate research.

"I am very happy about this award because it is for a statistics paper reporting research that was fully developed at KAUST with Stefano, who's now an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Notre Dame," Genton said.

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