Course Description

Shobhana Murali Stoyanov is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She began working there in the fall semester of 2009, teaching Stat 155, and has taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including Stat 2, Stat 20, Stat 21, Stat 131A, Stat 134, Stat 151A, Stat 152, and Stat 155. Prior to working at Berkeley, Shobhana was an adjunct Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Saint Mary's College of California, where she had re-entered academia as a lecturer in 2007, after a taking a few years off. After completing her doctorate, Shobhana spent a year at Lehigh University, where she was the C.C.Hsiung Visiting Assistant Professor. The courses she taught there were upper and lower division introductory probability and statistics. Shobhana received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001, where Professor Christian Houdré was her thesis advisor.

Philip B. Stark is a professor in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. His research centers on inference (inverse) problems, especially confidence procedures tailored for specific goals. He has published on the Big Bang, causal inference, the U.S. census, climate modeling, earthquake prediction, election auditing, food web models, the geomagnetic field, geriatric hearing loss, information retrieval, Internet content filters, nonparametrics (confidence sets for function and probability density estimates with constraints), risk assessment, the seismic structure of Sun and Earth, spectroscopy, spectrum estimation, and uncertainty quantification for computational models of complex systems. He is a pioneer of online teaching; his Statistics W21 was the first official online course offered by UC Berkeley. Prof. Stark has consulted for many branches of government, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice, the House of Representatives, the California Secretary of State, the California Highway Patrol, the Colorado Secretary of State, and the Illinois State Attorney. Prof. Stark has been a consultant or expert witness for companies including Apple Inc., AT&T, Capital One, Farmers Insurance, Freddie Mac, GMAC, HSBC, K-Mart, R.J. Reynolds, and Verizon Wireless. He has consulted on topics including truth in advertising, election contests, equal protection under the law, intellectual property and patent litigation, jury selection, trade secret litigation, employment discrimination litigation, import restrictions, insurance litigation, natural resource legislation, environmental litigation, sampling in litigation, wage and hour class actions, product liability class actions, consumer class actions, the U.S. census, clinical trials, signal processing, geochemistry, IC mask quality control, behavioral targeting, water treatment, sampling the web, risk assessment, credit risk models, and oil exploration.