KAUST Ph.D. student wins best paper award from American Statistical Association

KAUST Ph.D. student Jian Cao was recently selected as a best paper award winner by the American Statistical Association for his paper entitled 'Computing High-Dimensional Normal and Student-t Probabilities with Tile-Low-Rank Quasi-Monte Carlo and Block Reordering.' Photo by Meres J. Weche.

KAUST Ph.D. statistics student Jian Cao was recently selected as a best paper award winner by the American Statistical Association (ASA) for his paper entitled "Computing High-Dimensional Normal and Student-t Probabilities with Tile-Low-Rank Quasi-Monte Carlo and Block Reordering." Cao's paper was chosen in an ASA student paper competition under the section on Statistical Computing.

Cao is a member of Distinguished Professor Marc Genton's Spatio-Temporal Statistics & Data Science research group. He will be officially recognized for his award by the ASA later this year at the association's 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Denver, Colorado, U.S., from July 27 to August 1.

Tapping into other branches of high performance computing

"[My winning paper] is one self-contained project of my research on estimating high-dimensional multivariate normal and Student-t probabilities, which is one concrete branch of the extensive high performance computing field," Cao stated. "In this topic, I have developed relevant skills for easier tapping into other branches of high performance computing."

Of his award win, he noted, "It is definitely a great honor, especially being the first time I received a recognition of this type. This will encourage me to continue working hard, and in the meantime, it will be a great opportunity to sharpen my presentation skills."

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