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Forrest
W. Young, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, received his PhD in Psychometrics from the University of Southern
California in 1967. He has been on the faculty of UNC-CH ever since. Prof.
Young's teaching interests focus on \"Seeing what your data seem to
say\". This visually intuitive approach to statistics helps to clarify the
meaning of data. His courses, ranging from his introductory undergraduate
course on Psychological Statistics, to his advanced graduate courses on Data
Analysis, Visualization and Exploration, reflect this focus. To make
the process of understanding data visually intuitive, the burden is moved from
the person to the computer. You don't need to make an intensive effort to
understand your data: Rather, your computer makes intensive calculations so
that the data can be shown to you in a visually comprehensible way. This
approach to the role of computers is based on the intelligence augmentation
(IA) philosophy of Computer Science: Your computer is a device which should
augment your intelligence. It is also based on a Cognitive Science theory for
the construction of an environment for data analysis. Prof
Young and his students, over the course of a 10-year research and development
project, have created ViSta, a visual statistics system instantiating Prof.
Young's theories concerning visual environments for statistical analysis. ViSta
is a freely available system that is being used for teaching introductory and
multivariate statistics, for data analysis by statistically inexperienced
researchers as well as by those who are more advanced, and for advanced
research and development in graphical and computational statistics. ViSta
is based not only on Prof. Young's theory-based approach to data analysis, but
also on his 30-year career in computational and graphical statistics. Prof.
Young's early research interests focused on Multidimensional and Nonlinear
Multivariate Data Analysis (for which he was elected the President of the Psychometric
Society, and received the American Market Research Association's O'Dell award,
both in 1981). Via these research interests, Prof. Young became involved in
software development early in his career. Prof.
Young has served as a professional consultant on statistical system interface
design with SAS Institute, Statistical Sciences (the S-Plus system), and BMDP
Inc. He has written or designed data analysis modules for the SAS, SPSS and
IMSL systems. He is a member of the American Statistical Association's sections
on Computational and Graphical Statistics.")))) |