With the support of the Ronald J. and S. Doré Mead Fund for Student Experience in Statistics, Tyler Christians worked with Statistics Assistant Professor Kori Khan on a project aimed at understanding the impact forensic evidence has on trial outcomes. Tyler had previously worked to collect data on approximately 60 felony criminal cases that went to trial. For each of these cases, a defendant was charged with between 3 and 28 offenses. This data included information related to the number and types of forensic evidence presented to the jury as well as the jury’s decision on each offense. About half of the cases resulted in guilty decisions for all offenses and about half of the cases resulted in a mix of guilty and not guilty findings for the offenses. Tyler worked to use zero-inflated binomial regression models to understand how forensic evidence might impact the probability of being found not guilty. Tyler is a third-year Data Science major who is interested in pursuing a career in Data Science in a field related to public policy.
With the support of the Ronald J. and S. Doré Mead Fund for Student Experience in Statistics, Benedict Neo worked with Statistics Associate Professor Jarad Niemi on WEPPR. WEPPR is an R interface to the USDA computer model Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP). This interface will allow us to develop computer emulators of the WEPP computer model to increase the geographical range for daily erosion estimates provided by the daily erosion project. Ben is a senior Statistics major planning to graduate in Fall 2023 and enter the workforce for a couple of years before attending graduate school.