Please join us for the NSW SSA branch annual event on Wednesday 12th November at the Sutherland Room, The University of Sydney from 2 pm. The afternoon will start with presentations from PhD students from around NSW for the J. B. Douglas Awards. We are then proud to present our Annual Lecture by Professor Renate Meyer at 6pm, followed by the Annual dinner from 7pm.
We hope to see everyone there.
Program overview
2.00pm – 5:30 pm – J. B. Douglas Award presentations (with refreshment break)
5:30pm - 6:00 pm - Refreshments and award presentation
6.00pm – 7.00 pm – Annual lecture by Professor Renate Meyer
7.00pm – Annual dinner, please register here by Sunday Nov 9th
Please click here (TBC) for the JB Douglas Programme.
The location
The Sutherland Room is located at the Holmes Building, towards the northern side of the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus.
J. B. Douglas nominees
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Annual lecture
Speaker: Professor Renate Meyer
Renate is Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland. After obtaining an MSc and PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Aachen, Germany, she took up a lectureship at the University of Auckland in 1994. In 2010, 2017, and 2018, she held visiting professorships at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in Germany, and the Observatorie de la Côte d'Azur in France. She was awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship by the Royal society of NZ in 2018 for research on noise characterization studies for laser-interferometric gravitational wave observatories and the Littlejohn Research Award of the NZ Statistical Society in 2020.
Renate has wide research interests in applied Bayesian inference, in particular time series analysis with applications in astrophysics, state-space modelling in ecology, multivariate modelling using copulas, survival analysis in medical statistics, and stochastic volatility models for financial time series.
Title: Statistical Challenges of the LISA Space Mission
Abstract:
The new era of gravitational wave astronomy truly began on September 14th, 2015, with the groundbreaking first direct detection of gravitational waves, when LIGO recorded the signal from the merger of two black holes. This discovery confirmed a major prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity and opened an entirely new observational window onto the universe. Since then, across four runs by the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA network, gravitational waves from approximately 300 compact binary mergers have been reported.
Ongoing efforts are improving the sensitivity of current ground-based detectors, while next-generation observatories such as the Einstein Telescope and the Cosmic Explorer are being planned. In addition, the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will observe gravitational waves from space and open the low-frequency window of gravitational wave detection, enabling the observation of a wide range of sources - including white dwarf binaries within the Milky Way and mergers of supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. However, approximately ten years before the launch of the LISA mission, the scientific community is still far from solving some of the major methodological and computational challenges that will determine the mission's success.
Realizing the full scientific potential of these observations requires careful statistical analysis, particularly in characterizing the background noise by accurately modelling spectral features. This review will cover the fundamentals of gravitational wave data analysis, with an emphasis on LISA. Key challenges in this new data analysis regime will be highlighted, and novel Bayesian nonparametric methods for spectral density estimation and correlated and locally stationary noise will be proposed.
Our Sponsors
If your organisation can sponsor a small amount, we would appreciate this. All sponsor logos will be displayed in the J.B. Douglas programme.
TBC
Any questions, please feel free to contact the NSW Branch Secretary.
@StatSocAus
