Google at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Miami

Posted by Marianna Dizik, Statistician

The Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) were held in Miami, Florida, this year. Nearly 5,000 participants from academia and industry came to present and discuss the latest in statistical research, methodology, and applications. Similar to previous years, several Googlers shared expertise in large-scale experimental design and implementation, statistical inference with massive datasets and forecasting, data mining, parallel computing, and much more.

Our session "Statistics: The Secret Weapon of Successful Web Giants" attracted over one hundred people; surprising for an 8:30 AM session! Revolution Analytics reviewed this in their official blog post "How Google uses R to make online advertising more effective"

The following talks were given by Googlers at JSM 2011. Please check the upcoming Proceedings of the JSM 2011 for the full papers.

• Statistical Plumbing: Effective use of classical statistical methods for large scale applications
• Author(s): Ni Wang, Yong Li, Daryl Pregibon, and Rachel Schutt
• Parallel Computations in R, with Applications for Statistical Forecasting
• Author(s): Murray Stokely and Farzan Rohani and Eric Tassone
• Conditional Regression Models
• Author(s): William D. Heavlin
• The Effectiveness of Display Ads
• Author(s): Tim Hesterberg and Diane Lambert and David X. Chan and Or Gershony and Rong Ge
• Measuring Ad Effectiveness Using Continuous Geo Experiments
• Author(s): Jon Vaver and Deepak Kumar and Jim Koehler
• Post-Stratification and Network Sampling
• Author(s): Rachel Schutt and Andrew Gelman and Tyler McCormick

Google has participated at JSM each year since 2004. We have been increasing our involvement significantly by providing sponsorship, organizing and giving talks at sessions and roundtables, teaching courses and workshops, hosting a booth with new Google products demo, submitting posters, and more. This year Googlers participated in sessions sponsored by ASA sections for Statistical Learning and Data Mining, Statistics and Marketing, Statistical Computing, Bayesian Statistical Science , Health Policy Statistics, Statistical Graphics, Quality and Productivity, Physical and Engineering Sciences, and Statistical Education.

We also hosted the Google faculty reception, which was well-attended by faculty and their promising students. Google hires a growing number of statisticians and we were happy to participate in JSM again this year. People had a chance to talk to Googlers, ask about working here, encounter elements of Google culture (good food! T-shirts! 3D puzzles!), meet old and make new friends, and just have fun!

Thanks to everyone that presented, attended, or otherwise engaged with the statistical community at JSM this year. We’re looking forward to seeing you in San Diego next year.