R.W. Oldford

Contact

Surface Mail:	R.W. Oldford		R.W. Oldford
	Professor		Director
	Department of Statistics & Actuarial Science		Centre for Computational Mathematics in Industry and Commerce
	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. 3037		(519) 888 4567 Ext. 5999
	(leave no messages here)		voice-mail here
Fax:	(519) 746 1875		(519) 888 4313

Important notes about contact (especially e-mail):

These days I am mostly at the Centre for Computational Mathematics and can usually be reached there by phone (Ext. 5999). My phone in the Stats department is forwarded to this extension; I regularly pick up voice-mail only on Ext. 5999.

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. Or, make an appointment to see me through Wendy Zehr (519) 888-4567 Ext. 7711.

• E-mail from on campus addresses will (typically) reach me.
  • Students should be sure to use their uwaterloo.ca account. Hotmail accounts, for example, will almost certainly be ignored (similarly sympatico, rogers, excite, etc.).
• Statistics and Computing journal:
  • Do not send paper submissions to either of the above addresses,
  • All journal/paper inquiries/submissions should be made through the Statistics and Computing website.
  • Do not send e-mail directly to my personal e-mail address; it will have a high probability of being inadvertently filtered out and I will either never see it, or will see it at a much later date when certain "junk" mailboxes are trolled (personally) for lost mail.
  • More info on the journal can be found below.
• Off-campus inquiries about Computational Mathematics are best made to Ms. Wendy Zehr by phone (Ext. 7711) surface mail (above address) or by e-mail (wazehr at uwaterloo dot ca)
• e-mail address (with all the above in mind) is rwoldford at uwaterloo dot ca

Research

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 presently 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 me directly.

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 I host called Grains of Truth in a larger section called Archimedes' Sandbox hosted by Kee Dewdney.

Administration

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

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