Banquet Speaker
Dr. David Banks
Professor of the Practice, Department of Statistical Science, Duke University
Statistics and the Knowledge Economy
Biography
Dr. David Banks obtained a Ph.D. in Statistics in 1984. He won an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Berkeley working with David Blackwell. In 1986 he lectured at Cambridge, then joined Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Statistics in 1987. After roles at NIST, USDOT, and FDA, he returned to Duke in 2003.
He’s been coordinating editor of JASA, co-founded and edited Statistics and Public Policy, and launched several ASA sections. Past-president of the Classification Society and ISBIS, twice on the ASA Board, and a fellow of ASA, IMS, and AAAS. Awards include ASA’s Founders and De Groot Awards, and he delivered the Gosset and Deming Lectures. From 2018–21 he directed SAMSI. His research spans computational advertising, dynamic text networks, adversarial risk analysis, human rights statistics, agent-based models, forensics, and high-dimensional data analysis.
Abstract
Statistics came of age when manufacturing was king. Today’s industries are information-driven—and much of our expertise transfers directly. This talk explores statistics and AI in computational advertising, autonomous vehicles, and large language models.