Organizer:

Balasubramanian Narasimhan, naras@stat.stanford.edu

Panel Discussion
Balasubramanian Narasimhan and Douglas Bates

Computing technology is changing at a fast pace and many departments need resources to keep up with these changes as statistics is a field that is increasingly reliant on computing power.

This session is devoted to addressing the computing issues and challenges in statistics departments. We will address concrete issues such as hardware, software and some basic standards in computing tools for a working statistician. We will also discuss how some departments are dealing with such needs and how they are paying for them. The implications of new software such as Java and operating systems such as Linux will also be discussed both for research and education.

A session such as this is not a novel idea. In 1994 and 1995, there were workshops at the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota for system administrators in Math departments. Out of that came a very nice article by Sylvio Levy titled System Administration: the Mathematician's Perspective. We will aim to provide a statistician's perspective.

We hope to author a report based on discussions so that department heads will be able to better argue for resources from university administrators.