The National Program on Complex Data
Structures ended an extraordinarily successful 5 years on
April 30, 2008. We established eight projects, engaged 60
statistical scientists from across Canada, worked with over
30 collaborators, trained 70 graduate students and postdoctoral
fellows, and partnered with 20 organizations, including government
agencies, research laboratories, industry, research hospitals,
and foundations. This uniquely successful effort was a joint
initiative between the Statistical Sciences Grant Selection
Committee (GSC 14) and the three mathematical sciences institutes.
We were awarded $172,000 per year in the 2003 reallocations
exercise, and the mathematical sciences institutes committed
$50,000 per year in matching funds. We were successful in
leveraging funds from research, industry and other granting
agencies at a ratio of 2 to 1.
NPCDS is now in the process of being
transformed into the National Institute for Complex Data Structures
(NICDS), with primary funding from NSERC's Major Resource
Support Grants (MRS) program.
To this end an MRS proposal will be
submitted in October, 2008. Major features of this proposal
for the new Institute are a continuation and expansion of
the collaborative research projects of NPCDS, an increase
in support for postdoctoral fellows associated with the projects,
a program of intensive training events, a new administrative
structure, and international initiatives with Statistical
Sciences Institutes in the US and Europe. We have formed a
partnership with Accelerate Canada to enhance our internship
program, have held a consensus meeting with the Canadian Institutes
for Health Research to outline research areas of mutual interest
and strategies for raising the level of collaborative quantitative
research and training in the health sciences, and have established
sponsorship agreements with several Departments of Statistics
across Canada.
In the meantime, our projects continue
their research and training efforts. The project on Statistical
Innovation for the Analysis of Complex Data in Medical and
Health Science started in September, 2007, and held a short
course and a workshop at PIMS in April, 2008. This workshop
on Methodological Needs and Desires in Public and Population
Health Research emphasized workshop participation of both
health researchers and statisticians to foster technology
transfer of innovative statistical methodology into health
research applications. The project on Climate Statistics in
Agriculture held their inaugural workshop in June, 2007, in
Regina, and have begun work in earnest on their research objectives
of developing methods for localized weather forecasting, predicting
extreme events, and spatial interpolation. The project on
Forests, Fires, and Stochastic Modelling held a workshop at
the University of Western Ontario in November, 2007 on the
mathematical and statistical modelling of the spread of biological
and physical processes in forests. The project on Statistical
Methods for Complex Survey Data, continues its enormously
successful internship program by welcoming three new interns
to Statistics Canada in September, 2007. These and other activities
strengthen our conviction that model of NICDS and the vision
it has created for statistics in Canada is innovative and
exciting, and is the way the discipline will move forward.
