Shelemyahu Zacks has become the latest Binghamton University faculty member to be internationally honored for his work.
Zacks, a professor in the math department, is a co-winner of the 2008 Abraham Wald Prize, an international competition. Together with Nitis Mukhopadhyay from the University of Connecticut, Zacks authored a paper for the Sequential Analysis Journal entitled “Distributions of Sequential and Two-Stage Stopping Times for Fixed-Width Confidence Intervals in Bernoulli Trials: Application in Reliability.”
“Sequential analysis is the method of taking observations one by one (sequentially) or in groups. After each such stage of sampling a decision is made whether to stop or to continue sampling,” Zacks said. “This decision depends on the precision of estimates we wish to obtain.”
In other words, sequential analysis involves recording data without a predetermined sample size, thereby sometimes allowing a conclusion to be reached faster.
According to Zacks, the paper was about the problem of taking observations sequentially to estimate the log-odds in a sequence of binary experiments. It took several months to complete, and the idea was developed from previous papers authored by both Zacks and Mukhopadhyay.
“The odds is a ratio of the probability of success to the probability of failure in a binary experiment,” he said. “The objective is to get enough information to attain a specified precision of the estimate.”
Zacks said that he and Mukhopadhyay investigated the properties of a procedure that had first been proposed in the 1970s, though only some of its properties were known.
The results of the paper, Zacks said, will contribute to the field of sequential analysis.
“In the past most of the properties studied were of large-sample approximations,” he said. “In our papers we show methods for exact evaluation of the procedures.”
BU Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Mary Ann Swain said she was glad to see Zacks honored by his peers.
“I am proud that Professor Zacks was recognized with this award; it is richly deserved,” she said.
According to Swain, BU faculty regularly receive national and international attention for their scholarly activity.
“Their accomplishments bring greater prestige and visibility to themselves, their colleagues and students, and to Binghamton University,” she said.
Abraham Wald, the person for whom the award fund was endowed, was a famous mathematical statistician at Columbia University in the 1940s and 1950s. Along with colleagues, Wald was responsible for developing the field of sequential analysis during World War II, which was used in quality acceptance procedures of the U.S. military.
For example, Wald developed a way to figure out “how many items in a shipment of material to test in order to decide whether to accept a lot or to reject it,” Zacks said.
Wald died in a plane crash while touring India to give lectures in the mid-1950s.
Zacks said that he and Mukhopadhyay plan to continue their research and submit further papers to the journal.
For doctoral students conducting their own research, Zacks advised that journal papers should “contain new results and interesting contribution to the field.”