The Random Sample

At the end of 2021, our Centre, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, finishes up. ACEMS brought together researchers across the mathematical sciences, from the theoretical to the very applied. In this episode, we explore the impact ACEMS has had on those sciences, and beyond, to organisations in government and industry. Plus, our most important legacy - the next generation of research leaders and teachers.

Mathematics is exciting, enjoyable, and can surprise you, right? To help students to experience that when they do maths in the classroom, ACEMS has helped foster and grow a program called 'MathsCraft'. The program is designed to introduce to students in years 5 to 10 to the 'doing' of mathematics like, well, a mathematician! In this episode, we talk to three teachers in South Australia who are now introducing MathsCraft concepts into some of their teaching.

Thanks to the efforts of ACEMS Chief Investigator Rob Hyndman, the School of Business at Monash University now recognises software as a first class research output. In this episode, we will explore the role of software in the research process, including both the opportunities and challenges for researchers creating it, and whether other universities might follow the lead set by the Monash Business School in recognising the importance of software.

The European Meteorological Society just awarded an ACEMS researcher and her colleague in the Netherlands its top prize for innovation in meteorology. Their project sets out to develop new statistical methods to quality control wind data captured by amateur, or citizen, scientists and integrate that data with wind observations from official weather stations. That could give forecasters and others who need information on the weather a lot more data to base their decisions on. In this episode, we explore how they plan to use stats to bring credibility to crowdsourced weather data.

Monash University Professor of Statistics Di Cook is considered a world leader in Data Visualisation. In this episode, Di shares some of her new, innovative work into Data Visualisation. She also discusses why she is such a big proponent of reproducible research and open-source software.

Aurore Delaigle is a professor of statistics at The University of Melbourne, an ACEMS Chief Investigator, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of Science and the American Statistical Association Aurore's passion is using statistics to tackle challenging questions that solve real, practical problems. In this episode, we explore some of the different problems she is taking on with her statistical expertise.

What does mathematical research look like? If you visit Australia's residential mathematics research institute, you might be surprised by what you see. It's called MATRIX and it's located in regional Victoria. In this episode, we explore the importance of mathematics research, how it's done, and the unique environment MATRIX provides for mathematicians to make their research happen.

Ever wonder how the impossible becomes possible on the big screen? Not surprisingly, there's a lot of maths and stats that can make amazing things happen in your favourite movies. In this episode, we chat with a man who uses mathematical tools to create that movie magic. It's a must listen for anyone who's ever asked the question in maths class, "when am I ever going to use this stuff?". There are few cooler answers than what you'll hear in this episode!

Companies from many different sectors are all starting to realise one thing - that mathematics can help them make better decisions. That's the goal of a new ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre. It's called OPTIMA and its aim is to bring cutting-edge optimisation research to industry. In this episode, we explore the field of optimisation and why Centre Director Kate Smith-Miles believes OPTIMA is poised to tackle some very interesting and challenge industry problems.

The Safe Blues project was created to see in close to real-time how social mobility and epidemic spread interact. To test its mobile technology, the Safe Blues team has been conducting an experiment in New Zealand at the University of Auckland City Campus. The experiment took a turn, though, when Auckland went into lockdown a few weeks ago. In this episode, we explore how lockdown is both an opportunity and a challenge for this experiment.

Our guest is QUT Distiguished Professor Lidia Morawska who led the push to get health organisations to finally recognise the airborne spread of COVID-19. She is now leading an effort to change the way buildings and homes are ventilated to help prevent the spread of not just COVID, but other respiratory illnesses like the flu and the common cold.

Thousands of species around the world are being threatened by land clearing to make way for agricultural or urban development. To track land clearing, researchers are now turning to free satellite imagery to try to see what's going on in certain areas. But there's one big problem. At any given time, two-thirds of the earth is covered by clouds. To get around that, an ACEMS team developed new statistical modelling techniques to predict what the clouds are covering up in those images.

When things go your way, or don't go your way, how much of that is luck? Do we overvalue or undervalue a process or a person's performance because of how things eventually turn out? Do we need to take into account things out of our control? In this episode, we explore these questions and look into whether we need to do more to give some people a second chance.

Every five years, the Australian Bureau of Statistics conducts a national Census. In this episode, we explore what's new with this year's Census, how COVID is impacting it, and what's being done to avoid a repeat of what happened on Census night in 2016.

In a world that's more data-driven than ever before, we need people who can analyse and find the hidden stories within the data. In this episode, we explore the future of statistics with two early career statisticians who took very different paths to get where they are now. We also give you a sneak peak at the upcoming Early Career and Student Statistician's Conference.