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Dr. Constance van Eeden seminar

The van Eeden seminar is a yearly event in which graduate students vote for their favorite statisticians. The winner is contacted by the organizing committee and invited to give a talk in the department’s seminar. The speaker spends one or two days on-campus, and graduate students have the opportunity to have lunch and dinner with them.

This year’s speaker

The Constance van Eeden Speaker for 2026 will be Dr. Ryan Tibshirani, Professor, Department of Statistics UC Berkeley. Dr. Tibshirani’s research interests includes major contributions to regularization methods like the lasso and trend filtering, as well as conformal prediction. He will visit our department on Thrusday, April 2nd 2026.

Seminar Title: Online Conformal Prediction, Multi-Level Quantile Tracking, and Gradient Equilibrium

Event Date: Friday, April 2nd, 2026 - 10:30 am to 12:00 pm PT

Invited Speaker: Dr. Ryan Tibshirani, Professor, Department of Statistics UC Berkeley

Location: Online or ESB 5104/5106 at the University of British Columbia

Event registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12C94KdPA1x5jN5UUCAZ-TARmNwO6jmcVNIplXRUReu4/edit

Zoom registration: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/htGYWnrFSCWhHIs8-d4wqw

Abstract: This talk is about uncertainty quantification for time series prediction.

The overarching goal is to provide easy-to-use algorithms with formal guarantees. The algorithms we present build upon ideas from conformal prediction and control theory, are able to prospectively model conformal scores in an online setting, and adapt to the presence of systematic errors due to seasonality, trends, and general distribution shifts. We will then discuss an extension of these ideas to the setting of probabilistic forecasting, which is essentially a generalization of the framework to handle vector-valued predictions, i.e., predictions which take the form of a set of ordered quantile forecasts at different probability levels. Finally, we will generalize this even further to discuss an abstract property in online learning called gradient equilibrium, which encapsulates these settings, and more. .

More Information: Dr. Ryan Tibshirani has been invited to be this year’s van Eeden speaker by the graduate students in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia. A van Eeden speaker is a prominent statistician who is chosen each year to give a lecture, supported by the UBC Constance van Eeden Fund. The 2026 seminar is additionally sponsored by the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI), the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), and the Walter H. Gage Memorial Fund.

About

The van Eeden seminar is supported by the Constance van Eeden fund, which was established by Dr. van Eeden (1927–2021) in 1998. Dr. van Eeden was a mathematical statistician who made foundational contributions to estimation in restricted parameter spaces and nonparametric statistics.

The van Eeden fund is used to support many other activities on top of the student-invited speaker talk, such as inviting visiting professors for a week or more; organizing statistics summer schools; and giving out admissions awards to promising graduate students.

See the department’s webpage to learn more!

Sponsors

The 2026 van Eeden seminar is additionally sponsored by the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI), the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), and the Walter H. Gage Memorial Fund.

Previous presenters

Last updated: March 18, 2026