The Past, Present & Future of Statistics in the Era of AI: Speaker Details

Browse speaker bios and abstracts from the GW Department of Statistics' 90th anniversary event, "The Past, Present and Future of Statistics in the Era of AI."

Visit the event page for full details.

Plenary Speakers

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Susan Murphy
Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics & of Computer Science
Associate Faculty, Kempner Institute  |  Harvard University

"Online Reinforcement Learning in Digital Health Interventions"

 In this talk I will discuss first solutions to some of the challenges we face in developing online RL algorithms for use in digital health interventions targeting patients struggling with health problems such as substance misuse, hypertension and bone marrow transplantation. Digital health raises a number of challenges to the RL community including different sets of actions, each set intended to impact patients over a different time scale; the need to learn both within an implementation and between implementations of the RL algorithm; noisy environments and a lack of mechanistic models. In all of these settings the online line algorithm must be stable and autonomous. Despite these challenges, RL, with careful initialization, with careful management of bias/variance tradeoff and by close collaboration with health scientists can be successful. We can make an impact!

About Susan Murphy

Susan A. Murphy is Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and of Computer Science and Associate Faculty at the Kempner Institute, Harvard University. Her research focuses on improving sequential decision making via the development of online, real-time reinforcement learning algorithms. Her lab is involved in multiple deployments of these algorithms in digital health. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the US National Academy of Medicine. In 2013 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on experimental designs to inform sequential decision making. She is a Fellow of the College on Problems in Drug Dependence, Past-President of Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Past-President of the Bernoulli Society and a former editor of the Annals of Statistics. Visit Susan Murphy’s website.
 

Annie Qu
Chancellor’s Professor
University of California, Irvine  |  Department of Statistics

"Representation Retrieval Learning for Heterogeneous Data Integration"

In this presentation, I will showcase advanced statistical machine learning techniques and tools designed for the seamless integration of information from multi-source datasets. These datasets may originate from various sources, encompass distinct studies with different variables, and exhibit unique dependent structures. One of the greatest challenges in investigating research findings is the systematic heterogeneity across individuals, which could significantly undermine the power of existing machine learning methods to identify the underlying true signals. This talk will investigate the advantages and drawbacks of current data integration methods such as multi-task learning, optimal transport, missing data imputations, matrix completions and transfer learning. Additionally, we will introduce a new representation retriever learning aimed at mapping heterogeneous observed data to a latent space, facilitating the extraction of shared information and knowledge, and disentanglement of source-specific information and knowledge. The key idea is to project heterogeneous raw observations to the representation retriever library, and the novelty of our method is that we can retrieve partial representations from the library for a target study. The main advantages of the proposed method are that it can increase statistical power through borrowing partially shared representation retrievers from multiple sources of data. This approach ultimately allows one to extract information from heterogeneous data sources and transfer generalizable knowledge beyond observed data and enhance the accuracy of prediction and statistical inference.

About Annie Qu

Annie Qu is Chancellor’s Professor, Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. Qu’s research focuses on solving fundamental issues regarding structured and unstructured large-scale data and developing cutting-edge statistical methods and theory in machine learning and algorithms for personalized medicine, text mining, recommender systems, medical imaging data, and network data analyses for complex heterogeneous data. The newly developed methods can extract essential and relevant information from large volumes of intensively collected data, such as mobile health data. Before joining UC Irvine, Dr. Qu was a Data Science Founder Professor of Statistics and the Director of the Illinois Statistics Office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was awarded the Brad and Karen Smith Professorial Scholar by the College of LAS at UIUC and was a recipient of the NSF Career award from 2004 to 2009. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), the American Statistical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a recipient of IMS Medallion Award and Lecturer in 2024, and Jon Wellner Lecturer in 2024. She serves as Journal of the American Statistical Association Theory and Methods Co-Editor from 2023 to 2025, IMS Program Secretary from 2021 to 2027 and ASA Council of Sections of Governing Board Chair in 2025. Visit the Qu Lab website.