R.W. Oldford

Computational Statistics Research Group

From Fisher to Tukey

Computational Mathematics?

Statistics and Computing?

E-Mail?

Research	Teaching	Admin/Service
Software	Personal	Other Sites

Contact

Surface Mail:	R.W. Oldford		R.W. Oldford
	Professor		Associate Dean (Computing), Faculty of Mathematics
	Department of Statistics & Actuarial Science		and Director, Mathematics Faculty Computing Facility
	University of Waterloo		University of Waterloo
	Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1		Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1
	CANADA		CANADA
			...
E-mail	Below		Below
Voice:	(519) 888 4567 Ext. 33037		(519) 888 4567 Ext.
	voice-mail here		voice-mail here
Fax:	(519) 746 1875		(519) 888 4313

Important notes about contact (especially e-mail):

E-mail and spam being what it is today means that I have been very aggressive in my use of spam filters and in the filtering of my e-mail. This means that there is a high likelihood that mail sent to my e-mail address (unless we are in regular and recent correspondence) will end up being filtered out and so never seen by me. Other e-mail can end up in large mailboxes which I will only very infrequently check to see if there is a legitimate message amongst the junk.

My apologies if this has unduly inconvenienced you. If you really must reach me immediately and e-mail does not seem to work, phone me.

• E-mail from on campus addresses will (typically) reach me.
  • Students should be sure to use their uwaterloo.ca account. Hotmail accounts, for example, could be ignored (similarly sympatico, rogers, excite, etc.) and I will always reply to your @uwaterloo.ca address.
• Computational Mathematics:
  • I am no longer Director of the Computational Mathematics programs nor of the Centre for Computational Mathematics in Industry and Commerce .
  • All inquiries/graduate applications should be directed through the Centre for Computational Mathematics in Industry and Commerce
• Statistics and Computing journal:
  • I am no longer Editor-in-Chief of Statistics and Computing
  • All journal/paper inquiries/submissions should be made through the Statistics and Computing website.
  • More info on the journal can be found below.
• e-mail address (with all the above in mind) is rwoldford at uwaterloo dot ca

Research

Selected papers and talks: here.

My entry in the research directory for the Faculty of Mathematics.

My research interests lie in three separate but inter-related areas. They are

• data visualization, data mining and the design of integrated quantitative programming environments.

  In particular, I and others have spent considerable effort on a Common Lisp based programming environment for data analysis called Quail

• statistical and scientific method

  Here, my interest is in essentially foundational problems of method, causation, and induction.

• statistical education

  Principally introduction of statistical method into first courses in statistics.

I also have a general interest in statistics, science and public policy and have written a few papers on these topics as well. These and other selected papers and talks can be found here.

Graduate Students

Statistics and Computing

I am no longer the Editor-in-Chief of the cross-disciplinary journal Statistics and Computing.

• Some sense of the research impact of the journal can be seen from the impact-factor as produced by the Institute for Scientific Information.
• Submissions, queries about existing submissions, etc. please contact the publisher directly at Statistics and Computing.
• If you are interested in proposing a special issue devoted to one topic or one meeting, please contact the current Editor-in-Chief.

Software

1. Quail is a programming environment for quantitative analysis written in Common Lisp. For more information on its current state and how to access the software, check out the Quail homepage.
2. Eikosograms ; an interactive tool for teaching the axioms of probability including the concepts of conditional probability, Bayes rule, and conditional independence.
3. Other software. A miscellany of mostly code and data sets (including many snippets written for courses) These might be in S (or R), Quail, java, and even visual basic.

Teaching

• Courses which I have recently taught and for which I have some information posted on the web.
• Some pre-university pieces I have developed for the Faculty of Math website in a section called Grains of Truth in a larger section called Archimedes' Sandbox hosted by Kee Dewdney.

Administration/Service

• University administration

  A description of some of the administrative positions and duties I have had.

• 2003-2007 Elected member (Ontario rep) of the Board of Directors, Statistical Society of Canada

  One item of possible interest to others here is a document which R.J. Mackay and I presented in May 2006 to the Board as an alternative of the Society's document on the Accreditation of Professional Statisticians in Canada. The two documents are here (in pdf form):

  • The May 2006 version of the SSC's document: English version
  • And our proposed revision
  Our revised draft was rejected. The current official version may be found on the SSC website. under accreditation.

• 1991-1995 Elected Member of Council for the International Association of Statistical Computing (IASC)
• 1988-1997 Founding member and various official positions for the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (runs the biennial conferences "International Workshop on A.I. and Statistics").
• Editorial positions:
  • 2006-present Editorial Adviory Board, Statistics and Computing
  • 2001-2006 Editor-in-Chief, Statistics and Computing
  • 1990-2001 Associate Editor, Statistics and Computing
  • 1994-1998 Associate Editor, International Statistical Review
  • 1990-1994 Associate Editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association:Theory and Methods
  • 1990-1993 Associate Editor, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics

Other interesting WWW sites

• Organizations and Research Groups
  • ASA SCS --- American Statistical Association: Statistical Computing Section
  • IASC --- International Association for Statistical Computing
  • AI and Stats --- Society for Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
  • Data Visualization Group --- York University. Also has pointers to all kinds of interesting scientific data visualization sources.
  • CSNA --- Classification Society of North America
  • Machine Learning --- a good source of large datasets and software as well.
  • ACM --- Association for Computing Machinery.
  • ACM Special Interest Group in A.I.
• Software
  • Quail
  • IASC Software Archives
  • StatLib
• Journals and Newsletters
  • CSDA Computational Statistics & Data Analysis
  • Statistics and Computing
  • JAIR Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
• Electronic Journals available at Waterloo

Personal

• Photos of our house building in Nfld
• Location:
  View Larger Map
• The place:
  • Factual heritage site,
  • Romantic:
    Flat time from the American Scholar, 2006 by Robert Finch
    ... of course the characters which appear here are all relatives and Bert Burden is the man from whom we purchased the land.
• The language: Online Dictionary of Newfoundland English