INESC TEC researcher becomes president of International Association
Paula Brito, a researcher at INESC TEC’s Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support (INESC TEC), is the new president of the International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC).
On taking office, the LIAAD/INESC TEC researcher describes her new position as an honour not only for herself personally but also for LIAAD/INESC TEC and the University of Porto. This idea is reinforced by the manager of LIAAD, Alípio Jorge, who believes that it is a “great pride for LIAAD to have one of our researchers serve as president of this important international scientific association for statistical computing. Other than the prestige, I believe that this can bring important assets to INESC TEC”. According to Paula Brito, this new position is an opportunity to “make things happen”.
As president of the IASC, Paula Brito will not only manage several projects that the Association is involved in (from organising conferences, summer schools, scientific competitions for young people), but also represent the Association all over the world, namely in countries where this type of research is made. Due to this new position, the LIAAD/INESC TEC researcher will also be participating in the Council of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), which will allow her and the IASC to participate in “broader projects”, such as the “Capacity Building” initiative, whose goal is to take “Statistics and its new methodologies and tools to less developed countries or areas”, explains the researcher and Associate professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto (FEP).
Over the next two years, Paula Brito will try to respond to broad and global issues, involving people and entities from all over the world, manage the dissemination of information in different communication channels, and be familiarised with the state of the art in the general area of IASC.
Paula Brito will be combining her new position with the research activity at LIAAD/INESC TEC and with her teaching activities at FEP. Her goal “is to continue conducting research as part of the projects I’m involved in and to maintain my tasks as a professor”.
About Paula Brito
Paula Brito specialises in Multivariate Data Analysis. More specifically, her research focuses on the analysis of data outside normal patterns because they represent variability. As explained by Paula Brito, for instance, “there are different values for flights in multiple airports (indicators such as number of passengers, flight time, delays, etc.), but we are interested in analysing and comparing airports, and not just airports individually. Therefore, the information should be aggregated for each airport, and for us not to lose variability the values of the indicators will be intervals or distributions (instead of simple numbers or categories).” This is a recent area generally called “Symbolic Data Analysis”, and according to Paula Brito this area presents many challenges and problems. Also according to the researcher, this area “will certainly be key in the “Big Data” era, where large amounts of different data should be considered and analysed”.
About IASC
The IASC is a section of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) whose goal is to promote Statistical Computing worldwide, as well as technical and scientific exchanges and meetings between statisticians, IT professional organisations, institutions, government entities and the general public.
The IASC is responsible for the Journal Computational Statistics & Data Analysis and for organising its own conferences – the IASC World Conferences, the COMPSTAT in Europe (which took place at FEP in 2008), the ARS Conferences on Statistical Computing in Asia and Summer Schools, as well as sessions of the ISI.
More information here.
