People
Dr. Cecilia Balocchi (Course Organiser)
Office 5414, James Clerk Maxwell Building, King's Buildings Campus
My pronouns are she/her. I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Statistics at the School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Statistics at the University of Torino. I received my PhD in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania. My research interests include Bayesian nonparametrics and hierarchical modeling, clustering, Bayesian regression trees and spatial methods.
Dr. Simon Taylor (Lecturer)
Office 5314, James Clerk Maxwell Building, King's Buildings Campus
My pronouns are he/him. I am a University Teacher in Statistics in the School of Mathematics. My work focuses on teaching statistics and data science to undergraduate and Master’s students. I have a varied background in statistical research: from applied investigations into Alzheimer's research to computational intensive methods in statistics. Currently, my research is in a branch of time series analysis (where data are measured in sequential order over time) called changepoint analysis where we would like to estimate the point in time where the underlying mechanism generating the data shifts from one regime to another. My interest in data science as a subject goes far beyond the tediousness of computing standard statistics like means, variances and correlations. Rather, to me, data science is about the process of discovering the data's story, and begin able to communicate its story to others with accuracy, robustness and impartiality.
With thanks to Dr. Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel for setting up the first version of this course.