Hiroe Tsubaki

Dr. Tsubaki is the president of the National Statistics Center that is in charge of editing and promoting the Japanese official statistics and has joined the work of revising the curriculum guidelines in mathematics of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and contributed to the adoption of statistical education strengthening policy since 2015.

He decided to become an applied statistician in 1975 because he was so impressed by Dr. Genichi Taguchi's practical but poetical lecture of statistics in a freshman year at the University of Tokyo. Since being adopted as a lecturer in 1987, he has been involved in the activities of statistical quality control of production processes, new technology development experimental design, statistical reviewing of new drug applications and evaluating accuracy of environment measurements. He has been conducting problem solving education for business people at the Graduate School of Business Sciences of University of Tsukuba and several organizations.

As a domestic academic activity, he served as the president of Japanese Society of Applied Statistics, Japanese Society for Quality Control and Japanese Studies and Japanese Federation of Statistical Science Association. He is interested in connecting official statistics and academia as an applied statistician and contributes to dissemination of statistical methods as the grammar of science.

Contact information

Keynote talk

Hilary Parker

Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Together with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund founded Gapminder in 2005. Gapminder’s mission statement is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based world view everyone can understand.

She designed the user-interface of the famous animating bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, used by millions of students across the world, to understand global development trends. The tool was acquired by Google, and Anna worked at Google in Mountain View, CA as a Senior Usability Designer 2007 to 2010. At Google Anna improved search results for public data, developed data exploration tools for Public Data and made a bubble tool gadget (Motion chart) in Google Spreadsheets. In 2010 Anna came back to Gapminder to develop new free teaching material. Anna is now Vice President and Head of Design & User Experience at Gapminder. She also sits on the Gapminder Board. Anna holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Photography.

Anna founded Dollar Street, the biggest systematic image bank with representative home documentations based on data. At the moment we have almost 30,000 photos and 10,000 video clips, which are free to use under Creative Common license.

Together with Ola and Hans, Anna wrote the Factfulness book, launched in April 2018.

Contact information

Keynote talk

Chris Wild

Chris (http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~wild) has been an academic statistician for 40 years. His focus his shifted gradually from statistical methodology and medical applications towards statistics education. He is probably best known to ICOTS people for his 1999 paper Statistical Thinking in Empirical Enquiry with Maxine Pfannkuch. His current passions are dynamic computer graphics as a means both for understanding data and for understanding concepts and statistical processes. He is working on software-enabled ways of speeding up the rate that students can experience and learn from a wide range of data types, and transitioning from a point-and-click system to coding in R. His most visible software projects are iNZight, iNZight Lite and VIT. He is the founding Director of CensusAtSchool NZ, a project that has operated for over 15 years to enrich statistics teaching in New Zealand, and has had long involvement with curriculum development – including the nascent International Data Science for Schools Project. Chris is a former President of the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE), and an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of New Zealand’s Science and Humanities Academy, the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Contact information

Keynote talk

Helen MacGillivray

Helen is only the second female, and second Australian, to be President of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in its 130 year history. She was a first Australian Senior Learning and Teaching Fellow, first female President and first female Honorary Life Member of the Statistical Society of Australia. She is Editor of Teaching Statistics, a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a past President of the International Association for Statistical Education.

Her work in teaching and curricula design across multiple disciplines, class sizes and educational levels received support through national awards and significant grants. She has published textbooks, book chapters, keynote, invited or refereed papers on authentic learning and assessment in statistics, quantitative learning support and statistical research interests in distributional properties. She is joint chair and editor of the Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics, and has been a member of the organising or editorial committees for many conferences, including a number of ICOTS. Helen has chaired reviews of university departments and centres across Australia and internationally, and has worked as a consultant on teaching statistics in Australia and the UK.

Her leadership roles over many years include founding and directing university-wide Maths Access Centres, Symposia in Statistical Thinking, and mentored developmental programs for tutors. Helen has played key roles in mathematics and statistics school education on curriculum, resources and assessment moderation. She has given many professional development workshops for teachers, and a variety of successful extension and enrichment programs for high school students.

Contact information

Keynote talk