2026
Student Seminar: Yinjie Wang
4:30–5:00 pm Jones 111
Thursday, July 23, 2026, at 4:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis Presentation
Yinjie Wang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Simple and Effective Query-Adaptive Sparse Attention”
Student Seminar: Arnav Rastogi
2:00–2:30 pm Jones 111
Thursday, July 23, 2026, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis Presentation
Arnav Rastogi, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Measuring, Representing, and Steering Premium–Value Brand Positioning in Beauty and Personal Care”
Student Seminar: Brian Park
10:00–10:30 am Jones 111
Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis Presentation
Brian Park, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Separating Predictive Gains from Incremental Information: Text Embeddings and Analyst Forecasts of Corporate Earnings”
Student Seminar: Yuta Iwai
2:30–3:00 pm Jones 111
Monday, July 20, 2026, at 2:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis Presentation
Yuta Iwai, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Evaluation of McScan for Change Point Detection in High-Dimensional Linear Regression with an Application to Macroeconomic Data”
Student Seminar: Pratik Chheda
2:00–2:30 pm Jones 111
Monday, July 20, 2026, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis Presentation
Pratik Chheda, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Comparing Multivariate Value at Risk Forecasting Models: A Reproduction and Empirical Extension”
Student Seminars: Ziming Gan
10:00–11:00 am Zoom Meeting
Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Dissertation Defense Presentation
Ziming Gan, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Statistical Methods for Structure Discovery in Genomic and Clinical Data”
Student Seminars: Kulunu Dharmakeerthi
12:30–2:00 pm Jones 111
Thursday, June 18, 2026, at 12:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Dissertation Defense Presentation
Kulunu Dharmakeerthi, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Recovering Structure from Observational Data: Representation, Simulation and Stability”
Student Seminars: Aabesh Bhattacharyya
10:00 am–12:00 pm Jones 304
Thursday, June 18, 2026, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Dissertation Defense Presentation
Aabesh Bhattacharyya, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Problems in modern inference: distribution free prediction and goodness of fit testing”
Student Seminars: Dong Xie
4:00–5:00 pm Jones 111
Thursday, June 11, 2026, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Dong Xie, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Robust Estimation and Inference in Regression”
2nd Year Mini Seminars 2026
1:00–5:00 pm Rosenwald 011
Friday, May 22, 2026, from 1:00-5:00 PM, in Rosenwald 011, 58th St.
Mini-Seminars for Second-Year PhDs
Moderator: David Chen and Woohyun Choi
1:00 pm: Chandramauli Chakraborty: “Generative collapse does not imply discriminative collapse”
1:15 pm: Soutim Das: “Uncertainty Quantification for Sparse Canonical Correlation Analysis”
1:30 pm: Laura DeFalco: “Modeling Inhibitory Structure in Nonnegative Matrix Factorization”
1:45 pm: Joonhyuk Jung: “Le Cam, Birgé, Huber, and Strassen”
2:00 pm: Akash Kannan: “Anchor Divergence for Semantic Geometry in Contrastive Learning”
2:15 pm: Pui Kuen Leung: “Approximating the Permanent of a Random Matrix with Polynomially Small Mean”
2:30 pm: Xiaoli Li: “Tail Probabilities for SGD Iterates with Heavy-tailed Gradient Noises”
2:45 pm: Chenjia Lin: “Density ratio estimation for assessing generative models”
3:00 pm: Kaining Shi: “When Are Trade-Off Functions Testable from Finite Samples?”
3:15 pm: Xianwen Song: “Robust Estimation on Synchronization”
3:30 pm: Yinjie Wang: “Intersection between LLM and Statistics”
3:45 pm: Qichuan Yin: “Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox”
4:00 pm: Stephen Yin: “Understanding Semi-discrete Gromov-Wasserstein Distances”
4:15 pm: Ziyi Zhou: “F-Modeling and Tweedie’s Formula: Revisiting the Brown–Greenshtein Approach”
4:30 pm: Jeirui Zhu: “Density Compound p-values”
4:45-5:00 pm: Questions