Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

As the term "big data'' appears more and more frequently in our daily life and research activities, it changes our knowledge of how large the scale of the data can be and challenges the application of numerical analysis for performing statistical calculations. In this talk, I will focus on two basic statistics problems sampling a multivariate normal distribution and maximum likelihood estimation and illustrate the scalability issue that dense numerical linear algebra techniques are facing. The large-scale challenge motivates us to develop scalable methods for dense matrices, commonly seen in statistical analysis. I will present several recent developments on the computations of matrix functions and on the solution of a linear system of equations, where the matrices therein are large-scale, fully dense, but structured. The driving ideas of these developments are the exploration of the structures and the use of fast matrix-vector multiplications to reduce the general quadratic cost in storage and cubic cost in computation. "Big data'' offers a fresh opportunity for numerical analysts to develop algorithms with a central goal of scalability in mind. It also brings in a new stream of requests to high performance computing for highly parallel codes accompanied with the development of numerical algorithms. Scalable and parallelizable methods are key for convincing statisticians and practitioners to apply the powerful statistical theories on large-scale data that they currently feel uncomfortable to handle.

Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University, with support from the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation, are hosting a series of mini-conferences. The eighth in the series will be held at Georgia State University on February 9 -10, 2013. This mini-conference's featured speaker is Dr. Van Vu, who will give two one-hour lectures. There will be five one-hour talks and a number of half-hour talks given by other invited speakers. For more info, check titles, abstracts, and schedule.

(algebraic statistics reading seminar)

Charlie Crawford, president of Georgia Battlefields Association, explores the significance of the fall of Atlanta to Lincoln's re-election as President and examines George Barnard's photographic documentation of the battlefields around Atlanta. Crawford will discuss how land that is now a part of Georgia Tech's campus was once the site of Confederate and Federal fortifications. As president of Georgia Battlefields Association, a non-profit battlefield preservation group, Mr. Crawford has made over 95 presentations and led over 35 tours relating to the Civil War in Georgia.