Bahadur Memorial Lectures

Raghu Raj Bahadur, 1924–1997, Professor Emeritus, Department of Statistics and the College

In honor of Raj Bahadur's fundamental contributions to statistics and to our department.

R.R. Bahadur's Lectures on the Theory of Estimation
By Raghu Raj Bahadur, Stephen M. Stigler,
Wing Hung Wong, and Daming Xu

We are pleased to have Prof. John Lafferty, the John C. Malone Professor of Statistics & Data Science at Yale University, as our honored speaker, for the twenty-fourth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

  • Monday, April 28, 2025, at 11:30 AM
    Jones Laboratory, Room 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
    Pre-Seminar Refreshments will be served at 11:00 AM in Jones 303
  • Title: Abstraction in Artificial and Natural Intelligence: Part I: Relational and Sequential Reasoning
  • Abstract: 

    Two broad types of natural intelligence are used by humans (and other animals). One type is used to acquire semantic and procedural knowledge about the world. Another type is used to identify novel associations and relations.  This second type of intelligence often requires very little data, but significant time to "think" and search for solutions; recent AI models mimic this type of intelligence using "chain of thought." We present a framework for modeling relational learning and abstraction, using an inductive bias called the relational bottleneck. To assess the flexibility of the relational bottleneck, a universal approximation theory is developed. To analyze the advantages of sequential reasoning, an extension of statistical learning theory for autoregressive models is proposed. This offers insight into how chain of thought sequential supervision can improve learning efficiency.

  • Thursday, May 1, 2025, at 3:30 PM
    Jones Laboratory, Room 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
    Pre-Seminar Refreshments will be served at 3:00 PM in Jones 303
  • Title: Abstraction in Artificial and Natural Intelligence: Part II: Models, Mechanisms, and Experiments
  • Abstract: 

    Reasoning in terms of relations, analogies, and abstraction is a hallmark of human intelligence. How can abstract symbols emerge from distributed, neural representations? One general approach uses an inductive bias for learning called the "relational bottleneck" that is motivated from principles of cognitive neuroscience. We present a framework that builds this inductive bias into machine learning models that transform distributed symbols to implement a form of abstraction. Computational experiments are presented on a broad range of problems. Biologically plausible mechanisms for these models are proposed to shed light on how abstraction may be implemented in the human brain.

  • Directions to the Department of Statistics

We are pleased to have Prof. Emmanuel Candès, the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics
at Stanford University, as our honored speaker, for the twenty-third annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Prof. Dr. Sara van de Geer, Department of Mathematics, Seminar für Statistik (SfS), ETH Zürich, as our honored speaker, for the twenty-second annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Michael A. Newton, Professor of Statistics, University of Wisconsin, as our honored speaker, for the twenty-first annual Bahadur Memorial Lecture.

In Person

We are pleased to have Iain Johnstone, Professor of Statistics and Health Research and Policy (Biostatistics), Stanford University, as our honored speaker, for the twentieth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Håvard Rue, Professor of Statistics and Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, as our honored speaker, for the nineteenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Xiao-Li Meng, Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, Department of Statistics, Harvard University, as our honored speaker, for the eighteenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Donald Geman, Professor, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Johns Hopkins University as our honored speaker, for the seventeenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley, as our honored speaker, for the sixteenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Susan A. Murphy, H.E. Robbins Professor of Statistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as our honored speaker, for the fifteenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Peter J. Green, Emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, as our honored speaker, for the fourteenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Peter Bühlmann, Professor, Seminar für Statistik, ETH Zürich, as our honored speaker, for the thirteenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have James O. Berger, The Arts and Sciences Professor of Statistics, Department of Statistical Science, Duke University, as our honored speaker, for the twelfth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Peter Hall, Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, Australia, as our honored speaker, for the eleventh annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Steffen L. Lauritzen, Professor and Chair, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, as our honored speaker for the tenth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Stuart Geman, James Manning Professor of Applied Mathematics, Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, as our honored speaker at the ninth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Wing H. Wong, Professor of Statistics and of Health Research and Policy, Stanford Bio-X Program, Stanford University, as our honored speaker for the eighth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Elizabeth A. Thompson, Professor of Statistics and Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, as our honored speaker for the seventh annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Willem R. van Zwet, Professor of Mathematical Statistics and Probability from the Mathematical Institute, University of Leiden, as our honored speaker for the sixth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have David O. Siegmund, Professor of Statistics from the Department of Statistics at Stanford University as our honored speaker for the fifth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Adrian Baddeley, Professor of Statistics from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Western Australia, as our honored speaker at the fourth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Peter J. Bickel, Professor of Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, as our honored speaker at the third annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

We are pleased to have Persi Diaconis, Professor of Statistic and Mathematics, Stanford University and The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, as our honored speaker at the second annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.

  • Wednesday, May 24, 2000, at 4:30 PM
    Oriental Institute, Breasted Hall
    1155 East 58th Street
    "On Coincidences"

    Amazing coincidences seem to affect our day to day lives.  The talk will review work of Jung and Freud.  Sometimes a bit of quantitative thinking can show things are not so surprising after all.
     
  • Directions to the Department

We are pleased to have Lawrence D. Brown, Professor of Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania as our honored speaker at the first Bahadur Memorial Lectures.