I volunteered at the Statisticians for Society scheme by the RSS, who pairs its members with charities to work on their … data. I was paired with Freegle, which is an online platform for giving away items, essentially a crossover of Ebay and charity shops. This talk sums up my work with Freegle so far.

The title is based on “Elo World, a framework for benchmarking weak chess engines”, and the talk (slides) was timely amid the Carlsen-Niemann saga. The two main ways of modelling performance of human chess players are discussed, with modifications for detection collusion or cheating.

There are two main categories of the cross-section of networks and extremes. The first is extreme values observed at a network on say a 2-d Euclidean space. THe second is the extremes of certain characteristics of a network e.g. the degree distribution or other centrality measures. This presentation is on the latter.

Being late to package developments, I wrote the package crandep, not only to capture the dependency network of CRAN packages, but also to analyse it and answer some questions:

In April 2021 Lancaster University held a (virtual) Science Week. I gave a short talk (slide here), thus making my teeny-tiny presence on YouTube.

This presentation is an extension of my review paper on stochastic block models (SBMs). There is this ever-present issue of selecting the number of blocks (or groups) when applying an SBM. This presentation focuses on the approaches that use a criterion to select this number. Various criteria that existed then are: