The Pittsburgh Penguins have signed Carnegie Mellon’s Sam Ventura.

He’s not a play-making forward, a hard-hitting defenseman or a lightning quick goaltender, but the 27-year-old junior faculty member in the Statistics Department is hoping to make a big impact nonetheless.

Ventura is among the growing breed of statistical analysts in professional sports, an industry proliferated by Moneyball, the book and subsequent movie about the Oakland Athletics’ reliance on data analytics to build a successful baseball team. Last year, Karim Kassam, a former CMU professor of social and decision sciences, joined the Pittsburgh Steelers as their analytics and research coordinator.

“In any field, if you can objectively back up your decision with data, you’re doing yourself a favor,” said Ventura, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and Ph.D. in statistics at CMU.

A Pittsburgh native and lifelong hockey player and enthusiast, Ventura’s appointment as a consultant with the Penguins stems from his senior year at CMU and Andrew Thomas, a professor who taught a class about applying statistical methods to the sporting world.

Ventura...

Oh, play me some mountain music, like grandma and grandpa used to play.

Maybe you know that line from Alabama’s number one hit “Mountain Music.” What you may not know is Brian Junker, associate dean of CMU’s Dietrich College, has been granting that request weekly at the Schenley Park Visitor’s Center.
Junker, who has played guitar off and on since he was a teenager, took up the banjo eight years ago after becoming perplexed during a performance by local songwriter Emily Pinkerton.

“I couldn’t figure out how the motions that her hand was making corresponded to the number of notes coming out of the instrument,” he said.

He later learned it’s a banjo-playing style known as clawhammer, in which the hand assumes a claw-like shape and the thumb and middle or index finger strum the strings downward with the back of the fingernail.

Pinkerton let him borrow her banjo for a few weeks to give it a try. He enjoyed playing it so much that he bought one for himself.

Known to bring square dancers and cloggers to their feet for some pretty quick stepping, “old-time” or “mountain” music has a distinct and rhythmic sound that...

Sonia Siok (SDS & Stat, Dec 2012) has been named an Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar for 2012-2013. ACS Scholars "embody Carnegie Mellon's high standards of academic excellence, volunteerism, leadership, involvement in student organizations, athletics or the arts."

Meg Hayes (IS & Stat, 2011; MS in IS, Dec 2012) has been chosen for this year's Student Service Award by the Carnegie Mellon Alumni Association and will be honored at Ceilidh Weekend in October.

"Principles of Uncertainty," written by Carnegie Mellon University's Joseph B. (Jay) Kadane, has won the International Society for Bayesian Analysis' coveted DeGroot Prize.

The prize, awarded every two years to honor an outstanding statistical science book, was established to recognize Morris H. (Morrie) DeGroot, the founding head of Carnegie Mellon's Department of Statistics and renowned author of statistics and decision theory books.

"Jay Kadane's book, 'Principles of Uncertainty,' carries out two fundamental dimensions of Jay's career in statistics: the subjective Bayesian foundations of the field of statistics and the critical importance that statistical thinking and methods must play in a wide range of application areas," said John Lehoczky, dean of the Dietrich...