The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) today announces the appointment of Professor Tim Marchant as its new Director, commencing in January 2021, following a comprehensive recruitment process.

Most recently Dean of Research at the University of Wollongong, Professor Marchant brings extensive academic and leadership experience to AMSI, and has a demonstrated passion for mathematical sciences having been President of the Australian Mathematical Society, Chair of Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM) and Director of the Mathematics in Industry Study Group.

“AMSI has a strong track record in working with schools, universities, industry, philanthropists, government and the community in shaping policy and skilling Australia for the future through its diverse programs across education, research and industry”, said Dr Adelle Howse, AMSI Chair. “Our Institute is delighted to welcome Professor Marchant as Director at a very exciting time for the mathematical sciences community, facing high demand from many sectors of Australia’s innovation ecosystem.”

“Professor Marchant is looking forward to working with AMSI membership, staff, stakeholders, government and funding partners in delivering AMSI’s mission: championing the mathematical sciences for Australia’s advancement.” added Dr Howse. “Tim shares AMSI’s passion to promote and develop mathematical sciences in education, research and industry.”

Completing his PhD at the University of Adelaide before starting an academic career at the University of Wollongong, Professor Marchant is an Applied Mathematician whose research stature in the fields of nonlinear waves, optics and industrial modelling is evidenced by 80 journal publications and supervision of 17 graduate research students to completion.

Congratulations to Basim Alsaedi from University of Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and formerly from the University of New England where he completed his PhD, who has won the 2020 Dennis Trewin prize. Basim has received $1000 and a complimentary one-year SSA student membership for his efforts. 

The Dennis Trewin Prize, named after the former Australian Statistician, is awarded to a student from the ACT or regional NSW for their postgraduate research in statistics or data science. This year, five applications were received, from which shortlisted applicants were asked to submit a 15-20 minute recorded talk on their topic. Based on these submissions, we were privileged to have an external selection panel comprising of Dennis Trewin, Geoff Lee, Marijke Welvaert and Rachael Quill to decide on the recipient of the prize.   

As the winner of the Dennis Trewin prize, Basim presented his research on the topic of “Bayesian Modelling of Ion-selective Electrode Sensor Arrays” at the October Canberra branch meeting, which had an attendance of 29. Basim’s talk centred around the concept of the Limit of Detection (LoD) of a sensor – the lowest amount of a substance that can be reliably distinguished from absence of that substance for a given confidence limit. He proposed a Bayesian approach to determining the LoD that accounts for estimation uncertainty. This was then extended to the case where multiple sensors were being simultaneously used for substance detection.  

Following the talk, there was engaging discussion regarding the methodology used and the relevance of Basim's work to COVID testing. We thank Basim for presenting his fascinating research.  

Francis Hui

The pollsters did not perform well in the lead up to the 2019 May Federal election. All predicted a win by the Labour party (ALP) with margins from 2% to 4% of the two party preferred vote. In the event, the Liberal National Party (LNP) coalition won by 3.0%. Election and political polling are consequential and influential and play an important role in the democratic process. In recent times, at least one Prime Minister lost his job as a result of poor polling. Furthermore, policy decisions are influenced by opinion polls.

Both the Statistical Society and the Australian Market and Social Research Organisations (AMSRO) proposed reviews of the performance to determine why all the published polls incorrectly called the outcome at 2019’s Federal election and how methods can be improved in the future.

It was agreed that AMSRO would take the main responsibility for the review but that the Statistical Society would be closely involved.

Modalities

A panel was established under the leadership of Darren Pennay. Darren was the Founder and past CEO of the Social Research Centre. the other panel members were a mixture of political scientists, statisticians and polling experts. Several were Statistical Society members. They were assisted by an Advisory Board. John Henstridge was the Statistical Society nominee for the Board. The Chair was Dennis Trewin who is also a Statistical Society member.

AMSRO invited pollsters, media organisations and others who commission election and political polling to contribute to the inquiry. While the Inquiry Panel was grateful for the cooperation it received from the pollsters, the lack of access to data sets (which have been routinely provided to similar reviews overseas) and to detailed descriptions of the survey methods and statistical techniques used affected their ability to conclusively identify all the specific factors that contributed to the relative inaccuracy of the 2019 polls.

The Inquiry sought cooperation from the four pollsters responsible for these polls: Essential Research, Ipsos, Roy Morgan Research and YouGov (responsible for the YouGov Galaxy and Newspoll polls). Roy Morgan Research refused outright to co-operate.

Despite the limited information, a quite substantial report was prepared. It was released on 11 November and it and further information on the AMSRO Polling Inquiry can be found at: https://www.amsro.com.au/amsro-polling-inquiry/.

Findings

The report said that the polls erred in their estimate of the vote in a manner that was statistically significant and erred in the same direction and at a similar level. It also found that the source of errors lie in the polls themselves and was not a result of a last-minute shift in preferences among voters.

The first preference votes were either underestimated (LNP) or overestimated (ALP) because of inadequately adjusted, unrepresentative samples. The report said that it was very likely the polls were skewed towards over-representing more politically engaged and better educated voters and this bias was not corrected and as a result, the polls over-represented Labor voters.

The Inquiry Panel could not rule out the possibility that the uncommon convergence of the polls in 2019 was due to ‘herding’ although it may be due, in part, to their methodologies leading to similar weaknesses in the representativeness of their samples.  The absence of access to the data or the detailed methods means that this this remains a conjecture.

The Inquiry Panel also found that the reporting of the polls failed to meet the basic disclosure guidelines for editors and journalists set out by the Australian Press Council.

Recommendations

The Inquiry report has made 10 key recommendations aimed at improving polling methods and the disclosure thereof.  Recommendations include (1) calling for an enforceable Code of Conduct for Election Polling developed in consultation with experts including statistical experts; (2) improvements and greater transparency in polling methods, (3) better measures of uncertainty and (4) better education of the media and public on polling.

We believe there is an important role for statisticians and members of the SSA in particular in improving the quality of polls, both in the design of the surveys and in generating a productive debate about their performance. 

Postscript - 2020 US election polling

The accuracy of the US election polls has come under criticism.  Most of the criticism came early when it appeared that Biden might lose the election. As the count progressed with the inclusion of mail-in votes the difference between the poll predictions and the actual vote narrowed. In the end, how did the polls perform?

The following analysis is based on data from Real Clear Politics, one of the main poll aggregators in the US.

Our [Real Clear Politics] conclusions are:

• The performance of the polls was not great but better than generally perceived.
• At the national level, the poll average was a 7.2% margin to Biden compared with an expected final outcome of about 4.5%. At least 4 of the polls predicted the result within the margin of error.
• There was only one State where there was a polling miss – FLORIDA – where the average of the polls suggested a small win to Biden rather than a comfortable win to Trump.
• The average of the polls was very good in many of the Swing States and predicted the correct outcome in PENNSLYVANIA, MICHIGAN, MINNESOTA, NORTH CAROLINA, ARIZONA, and NEVADA, mostly quite close to the actual margin.  We are treating GEORGIA as an effective dead heat, but the average of the polls suggested a small win to Trump.
• The average of the polls was outside the margin of error in several of the rust belt States – OHIO, WISCONSIN, IOWA.

Like Australia and in the 2016 US elections, we expect the main reason for any lack of performance will be unrepresentative samples but that is conjecture at this stage. Polling is more difficult in the US because they have to predict election turnout which may vary between the candidates.

Dennis Trewin and John Henstridge

Science and Technology Media Release

Monday 9 November 2020

STA warmly welcomes Dr Cathy Foley as Chief Scientist

Science & Technology Australia has warmly welcomed today’s announcement that former STA President Dr Cathy Foley AO PSM FAA FTSE will take the reins as Australia’s next Chief Scientist.

Science & Technology Australia President Associate Professor Jeremy Brownlie congratulated Dr Foley on behalf of the STA membership representing Australia’s 80,000 scientists and technologists.

“Cathy is a superb choice for this role. She is hugely respected across the worlds of science and policy, a wise and clever leader, a generous mentor, and a skilled public communicator,” he said.

“All of those qualities will come to the fore in this moment of historic opportunity for science: to apply the centrality of science during COVID to so many other complex challenges.”

“We are also especially proud that she is a former President of STA, which is a crucial voice for the science community.”

Dr Foley was also the inaugural chair of the STA policy committee in its re-formation in 2017, deepening the sector’s policy engagement, and served as STA President from 2009-2011.

She is also a highly accomplished physicist and the current Chief Scientist at Australia’s national science agency CSIRO. Her research interests have focussed on solid state physics, quantum physics, and research translation.

The events of 2020 have highlighted the crucial role of bringing scientific advice to Government – an effort led by the Chief Scientist – and we know Cathy will excel in the role.

She was deeply involved in the STEM sector’s response to the bushfire crisis providing expert advice on the capabilities of industry and science and has had a key role in the Rapid Research Information Forum.

“STA also thanks outgoing Chief Scientist Alan Finkel for his work in creating the Science Policy Fellows program, setting up the RRIF and engaging widely.”

A LEGENDARY way to do observational data analysis at scale

The South Australian branch was pleased to have A/Prof Nicole Pratt to present at the august monthly virtual branch meeting.  A/Prof Pratt is an expert in biostatistics and pharmaco-epidemiology, specializing in the development of methodologies to study the effects of medicines and medical devices in linked health-care datasets.  She gave a talk on A LEGENDARY way to do observational data analysis at scale.

The talk was interesting and well-presented. A/Prof Pratt started with information on OHDSI (Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics) coordinating center which works as a platform for international researchers to work collaboratively on a large-scale observational health dataset. In this distributive network, source data has transferred to standardized de-identified patient level data and you can perform analytics and produce results for publishing. She talked about ATLAS software and cohort Pathway package to perform collaborative studies and gave example of a hypertension study where data from 11 different databases in 4 countries (N= 250 million) was analyzed for different treatment pathways to treat hypertension. 

Later in her talk, A/Prof Pratt informed us that OHDSI collaborative launched a Large-Scale Evidence Generation and Evaluation across a Network of Databases (LEGEND) research initiative, aiming to generate evidence on the effects of medical interventions using observational healthcare databases and addressing the missing evidence from clinical trials. She defined ten principles of LEGEND, prescribing the generation and dissemination of evidence on many research questions at once, comparing all treatments for a disease for many outcomes, thus preventing publication bias and avoiding p-hacking. The Best-practice methods addressed measured confounding and control questions (questions where the answer is known) quantify potential residual bias. She gave an example of a study published in Lancet where they have looked at comprehensive comparative effectiveness and safety of first-line antihypertensive drug class, where every treatments contrast for every health outcomes (52 outcomes) with 9 different data sources. This study has enhanced the evidence around first line hypertension. She concluded her talk mentioning how OHDSI framework helping in generating evidence in a network of databases to assess consistency, by sharing open source analytics code to enhance transparency and reproducibility, but without sharing patient-level information, ensuring patient privacy. 

There were quite few questions from the audience after the talk, finishing the meeting at 7:10 pm.

By Aarti Gulyani

Australia’s peak body for science and technology has today welcomed four new members to its Board of Directors, representing strong diversity and breadth in STEM disciplines.

STA announced the following new appointees to its Board:

• Agricultural and food sciences – Mr Michael Walker, Soil Science Australia Executive Officer
• Biological sciences – Dr Tatiana Soares da Costa, Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (La Trobe University)
• Physical sciences - Professor Jodie Bradby, Australian Institute of Physics (ANU)
• Technological sciences - Dr Vipul Agarwal, Australasian Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering, Royal Australian Chemical Institute (UNSW Sydney)

STA President Associate Professor Jeremy Brownlie warmly welcomed the new members of the Board, which oversees governance and sets strategy for the organisation.

“STA’s governance reflects our diverse membership, which collectively represents over 80,000 STEM professionals in Australia,” Associate Professor Brownlie said.

“Our incoming Board is genuinely diverse across the STEM disciplines represented, as well as across gender and culture.”

“Diversity of experiences and expertise is vital to strong Boards. It’s essential to robust decision-making, quality governance and visionary leadership for organisations.”

“On behalf of the organisation, I warmly welcome our incoming Board members, both those who have been newly appointed, and those who have been re-elected.”

Dr Tom Cresswell (Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Australasia), Jas Chambers (Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society), Marina Costelloe (Institute of Australian Geographers), Professor Adrian Barnett (Statistical Society of Australia) and Professor Rachel Burton (Australian Society of Plant Scientists) return to the STA Board for another 2 year term each.

STA’s new executive committee will be elected at the Annual General Meeting in late November.

For interviews, please contact STA Communications Manager, Zoya Patel on 0406 249 786.

More about our new Board members:

Dr Vipul Agarwal

Vipul is an NHMRC Fellow and Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) who applies multidisciplinary research to develop bioimplants for spinal cord regeneration. He has strong experience working with industry and takes pride in advocating diversity and equity in science and scientific research.

Professor Jodie Bradby

Jodie is a physicist at the Australian National University with expertise in high pressure physics and the creation of new crystal phases of matter. Her group has made a type of silicon that can create a more efficient solar cell and a new form of diamond which is predicted to be even harder than regular diamond. Jodie is the Past-President of the Australian Institute of Physics and was a former AIP Women in Physics medallist. She has a strong interest in equity issues in STEM.

Dr Tatiana Soares da Costa

Tatiana is an early career biochemist and Group Leader at La Trobe University. She has won NHMRC Early Career and ARC DECRA fellowships to research antibiotics and herbicides to tackle the exponential rise in resistance. Tatiana was the founding President of La Trobe’s postdoctoral society. She is Editor of the Australian Biochemist magazine and the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s Chair of Communications and Science Advocacy.

Mr Michael Walker

Michael is Executive Officer of Social Science Australia and has spent his career in horticultural and agricultural professional associations. He has extensive experience in NFP membership, events management, board governance and project management. Michael is a former Chair of the Horticultural Training Council and of Primary Skills Victoria.   

Propensity score techniques in multiple treatments framework: the estimation of neighbourhood effect

The speaker for the September branch meeting was Margherita Silan, who is a postdoctoral research fellow at Padua University. Margherita was the winner of the Italian Statistical Society annual award for best PhD in Applied statistics. Her research interests include causal inference in multiple treatment frameworks, composite indicators and partially ordered set theory. Margherita’s research involved the estimation of the neighbourhood effect using propensity score techniques in a framework with many treatments, with an application to two health outcomes in Turin.

The neighbourhood effect is the independent causal effect of a neighbourhood on health and/or social outcomes. In order to compare the neighbourhood effect, it is important to make neighbourhoods comparable with respect to confounders. The Turin longitudinal study was used as the data source and outcomes considered were hospitalised fractures and incidence of depression or dementia. Neighbourhoods in Turin were represented as treatments, with at least 10 neighbourhoods included, depending on the partition methods.

Magherita compared two methods to estimate the neighbourhood effect; inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) for multiple treatments and logistic regression with dummy indicators for neighbourhoods as covariates in the model. Simulations were performed to compare the methods with fracture as the outcome. Performance of the two methods depended on the scenarios simulated.

The neighbourhood effect was estimated for the outcome of dementia or depression using IPTW. An effect on mental health with respect to the mean was found, which was protective or harmful depending on the neighbourhood and gender. Based on her results, Magherita proposed a novel method: Matching on Poset based Average Rank for Multiple Treatments (MARMoT). The average rank summarises individual characteristics which are important for treatment allocation and is used as a tool to improve the balance of covariates between groups through matching. She described how to use the tool to achieve covariate balance and performed a simulation study to evaluate its performance. MARMoT improved covariate balance for 70 neighbouring zones in Turin and the average treatment effect in the treated changed considerably for many neighbourhoods.

The talk concluded with a Q & A session, including suggestions for future collaboration and requests to share her code.

By Lan Kelly

For the past couple of years Rob Salomone has been part of the University of New South Wales and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers as a post-doctoral fellow. At the latest meeting of the New South Wales branch, held on 30th September 2020, Rob gave a very entertaining talk about Monte Carlo - the statistical version.

As is well-known, Monte Carlo is a casino city in the small Mediterranean country of Monaco. In the 1940s, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, USA, working on atomic bomb research, borrowed the name for the idea of using sampling methods to approximate integrals. Monte Carlo methods are now a mainstay of statistical methodology. Rob described the Monte Carlo approach in general, and then recent from contributions him and his collaborators.

A recurring theme throughout Rob's presentation was "integration by darts". This involved a graphic of an image plot of a bivariate function, with dart board concentric circles superposed - and these circles being contours of a bivariate density. Throwing darts matches draws from the density, which can be used in an obvious way to approximate the expectation of the function. However, if the bivariate function has important features well away from the bull's eye then integration by darts, i.e. Monte Carlo approximation, can perform poorly. Even in this two-dimension setting the challenges were made apparent. Connections with Bayesian inference were given.

Getting into the second half of this very animated talk, Rob discussed remedies for Monte Carlo challenges such as multiplying by one and adding zero in very smart ways. One of several examples from Rob's research concernedrare events for the sum of dependent log-normal variates. He pointed to papers such as Botev, Salomone & Mackinlay (2019), Salomone, South, Drovandi and Kroese (2020) and Hodgkinson, Salomone & Roosta (2020). The last one got into Stein operators and Polish spaces - which, from appearances, involve some elegant mathematics in the name of improved Monte Carlo statistical methodology.

Matt Wand
University of Technology Sydney

The annual 'MathsADDS' careers guide published by AMSI in collaboration with La Trobe University informs and inspires students with maths-based career successes, and insights into the breadth of professions and industry sectors that can be entered with an undergraduate mathematics-based degree. 

The 23rd (2020-21) edition of MathsADDS is available to download here.

Students often ask: “how will I use maths in the real world?”  MathsADDS provides students and careers advisors with an array of real job advertisements reinforcing the opportunities available. 

Changing perceptions of the value of mathematics, this 23rd edition of MathsADDS highlights career possibilities in ten industry sectors.  It inspires students with profiles of practitioners, emphasising women excelling in careers requiring mathematical skills including a financial analyst, a civil engineer working on Melbourne’s West Gate Tunnel project, and a robotics engineer at the Department of Defence utilising unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). 

Introduced again by maths teaching icon, Eddie Woo, MathsADDS includes endorsements by science luminaries including former Australian of the Year, Professor Michelle Simmons, the nation’s Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, and Australia’s ambassador for STEM, Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith.   

This year has presented significant challenges to universities in staging traditional Open Day activities.  Whether your insitution's event was on-campus or virtual, forwarding a copy of MathsADDS (either online using the link below, or by sending a soon to be available print copy) enables your recruitment team to follow-up with your prospective students. 

Could I ask you to please forward this email to your Faculty's / University's recruitment management? 

Print copies are in production and will be delivered to your School / Department.  Again (if possible) you may care to send copies to your Recruitment Office.  

With best regards, 

Clint Rodgers

AMSI Marketing and Communications Manager

Julie Simpson, Head of the Biostatistics Unit and the Melbourne Clinical and Translational Sciences Platform, has been awarded the 2020 Australasian Epidemiological Association mentoring award. The award was announced at the AGM on 16^th September.

In their speech to award Julie, nominees David Price and Karen Lamb said “Julie is truly an inspiration to us and to the many biostatisticians, epidemiologists and public health researchers that are fortunate enough to know her. Julie is a fantastic role model; she sets the example for the type of researcher that so many of us aspire to be. She is always focussed on promoting and supporting others around her by assisting with fellowship applications, nominating people for prizes, extending invitations to provide workshops and seminars to junior members of staff, and offering opportunities for more junior members of her team to be on projects with collaborators in her place. She is always available for a chat, whether it be for technical queries or to provide help managing a difficult collaborator. It is the selflessness that Julie offers in mentoring and supporting her team that really stands out. She will gladly provide assistance on applications or publications regardless of whether she is involved or will personally benefit from the outcome. Julie is so invested in being a good supervisor that the success of her peers and team is the reward. We know of no one more deserving of this award."

Congratulations from all of us at SSA!