Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

THE NATIONAL PROGRAM ON COMPLEX
DATA STRUCTURES (NCPDS)
Director: Jamie Stafford (Toronto)
Program Committee: David Bellhouse (UWO), Richard
Cook (Waterloo), Paul Gustafson (UBC) Mike Hidiroglou
(Statistics Canada), Nancy Reid (Toronto), Randy Sitter
(Simon Fraser), Ed Susko (Dalhousie), and Louis-Paul
Rivest (Laval)
NPCDS is a joint initiative between Canada’s Statistical
Sciences Community and the nation’s three Mathematical
Sciences Institutes, with funding provided by NSERC. Its
goal is to foster nationally coordinated interdisciplinary
research projects involving interactions between statisticians
and scientists working with complex data sets. A
two-stage mechanism is used in which an inaugural workshop
gets the research network going, to be following by a
proposal for a two-year research project.
During the 2004–05 year projects and pilot projects
within the National Program met April 9–4 at the Banff
International Research Station. Leaders in Computer
Experiments, Data Mining, Genomics and Survey Methods
each organized a day of activity in their respective fields.
An additional day was devoted to three pilot projects that
had inaugural workshops planned in the areas of Biomedicine,
Forestry and Marine Ecology. Research presentations
were incredibly varied and included topics that concerned
pharmacophore identification, complex HIV proteomic
data structures, communications security, studies of complex
traits, social behaviour, forest fires, high throughput
genomics, tracking of leatherback turtles, turbulence, and
so on. Underlying such a diverse set of topics was a genuine
common interest in complex data, regardless of its origin.
This, in effect, bonded participants in their vision of what
NPCDS can bring to the statistical sciences community in
Canada. As such the event was instrumental in generating
considerable enthusiasm for the Program’s model. Concretely,
the establishment of interdisciplinary projects with
quantitative leadership was viewed as a vehicle that gives
the statistical community a greater voice in the research
agendas of other disciplines. These projects have the potential
to create a culture in statistics where training takes
place in intensely interdisciplinary environments ensuring
young researchers become effective collaborators in the
long run. This was evident by the number of excellent presentations
given by graduate students, including Norberto
Pantoja Galicia, Jason Loeppky, Pritam Ranjan and others
T h e N a t i o n a l P r o g r a m o n
C o m p l e x D a t a S t r u c t u r e s
The event was timely as the Program is currently entering
the second half of its four year funding cycle and it offered
an opportunity for participants to assess what has been
accomplished thus far. The general view was “a lot!”. With
potentially seven national projects established in a two year
span the Program has engaged the broader community
in a robust way. Credit must be attributed to the many
individual researchers who are investing time and energy in
this endeavour. During the week at Banff general meetings
were held where progress, and the future of the program,
was discussed openly. For example, issues concerning
budget surpluses led to consideration of an RFP for training
initiatives, which is now being drafted for the approval of
NPCDS governance. In addition, plans for the renewal of
the program have been set in motion, although these have
been complicated by the uncertainty surrounding NSERC’s
reallocation process. One positive development has been
the consideration of expanding the Program as a joint
CIHR/NSERC initiative. This appears to be an extremely
exciting, if challenging, prospect. General enthusiasm for
this comes not only from our own community, but also
from key players within CIHR. This gives some cause for
cautious optimism.
Enthusiasm for the National Program from other disciplines
was clearly evident during the inaugural workshop
on Forests, Fires and Stochastic Modelling held at the Fields
Institute May 24–28, 2005 (see the detailed report later in
this section). Forest fires are a natural component of many
of Canada’s forested ecosystems but they also pose threats
to public safety, property and forest resources. Every year,
forest fires cause millions of dollars worth of damage and
force the evacuation of some communities. Such problems
will be exacerbated as people establish more homes and cottages
in and near forested areas and climate change alters
forest vegetation and weather. The purpose of the workshop
was to bring together forestry researchers and statisticians
to identify areas of potential collaboration. The event began
with a day of introduction to the language of forest fires
with contributions by researchers from the Ontario Ministry
of Natural Resources, the Canadian Forest Service,
Fire Science Lab and the US Forest Service. The remainder
of the workshop focused more on statistical techniques,
although even here applications abounded including modeling
wildfires, lightning strikes, seismology, fire indices,
visualization, weevil infestations, Boreal ecosystems and so
on. Many keynote speakers such as David Vere-Jones, David
Brillinger, Gail Ivanoff, Andre Dabrowski, Dean Slonowsky,
focused on issues of considerable depth including spatial
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 47