Place: Room 420, GP South (Building 78)
Time: Thursday 29th May 2008 , 10:30 morning Tea, 11:00am seminar

Speaker: Professor Daniel Kaplan, Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.
       
Title: Untangling causation in complex systems

Abstract: For many people, statistics is about simplifying systems so that some standard test (e.g., the t-test) can be applied.  Over the last decade, new approaches to doing statistics have emerged that can respect the intrinsic complexity of systems.  I'll introduce a couple of these approaches that focus on networks of influences: multiple regression with large numbers of explanatory variables and the topological analysis of causal networks.  You don't need to know much about conventional statistics to be able to follow the talk.

Biography: Danny Kaplan is visiting UQ from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA where he is the DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science.  His training is in physics, economics, and biomedical engineering.  His research has involved developing methods grounded in
nonlinear dynamics to the analysis of signals from physiological systems. He is the author of the textbooks "Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics" (with Leon Glass) and "Introduction to Scientific Computation and Programming." Currently he is working on a textbook that departs radically from the way statistics is usually introduced in university in order to prepare students to use the methods that are the subject of the talk.

Dr. Ariel Liebman
Research Fellow
ARC Centre for Complex Systems
School of ITEE, University of Queensland

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