2017 SPAIG Award

NC State and the National Security Agency have won this year’s American Statistical Association’s SPAIG (Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government) Award for their partnership in the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS). The award recognizes excellence in collaboration between academe, industry, and government that results in significant contributions to statistics with applications to real-world problems. The award will be presented in Baltimore in August at the Joint Statistical Meetings.

LAS is a research lab that is working to improve intelligence analysis by developing new methods, techniques, and tools. Like many other areas of business and government, intelligence analysis has been fundamentally changed by the advent of “big data.” LAS brings together researchers from academia, industry, and government to try to find solutions to these challenging problems.

In 2017, LAS will work with 50 government staff, 40 faculty and 70 students from 10 universities (including faculty from 8 of the 10 colleges at NC State), and 10 industry partners. Within the Department of Statistics, Alyson Wilson is the LAS Principal Investigator. Soumen Lahiri, Eric Laber, and Jon Richards-Stallings are all collaborating on LAS projects, and Jared Stegall, a recent department graduate, is working as a post-baccalaureate fellow.