​UIC students excelled in the 2020 Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modelling (CUMCM). Li Xinyue and Xu Bokai, both majoring in Data Science, as well as Computer Science and Technology student, Xu Zimu, won the national Second Prize and the provincial First Prize. Another two teams won the provincial First Prize, while nine teams got the provincial Second Prize, 16 teams won the provincial Third Prize, and 24 teams gained the provincial Successful Participants.

Chair Professor and Department Head of Statistics and Data Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Prof Shao Qi-Man, gave a lecture on “Self-normalization: Taming a Wild Population in a Heavy-tailed World”, at the invitation of UIC's Division of Science and Technology (DST) and the BNU-UIC Research Center for Mathematics, on 4 November. Prof Shao Qi-Man started from the definition of Self-normalization. He humorously explained the origin of the name of Student's t-statistic, and how W.S. Gosset invented Student's t-statistic by using data from the winery, thus creating a precedent for small samples. Student's t-statistic is one of the most important statistics, which is widely used in probability, statistics, finance and other scientific fields.

​At night, He Xin set the alarm clock at 6:30 am the next day, ready to go to sleep. He would take the commuter bus at 7 am to Huawei's Songshan Lake Base for work tomorrow. Working at the Alipay Building of the Ant Group in Hangzhou, Li Qianqian got off duty a little later than usual. Still, she decided to go to the gym to complete the goal for today's exercise.

The year 2020 has been a challenging time for all of humanity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many researchers are conducting abundant research to fight against this awful virus. In the first half of 2020, a paper has been published in the international academic journal titled ‘Nature’, stating that by analysing data, researchers have successfully identified 332 kinds of protein-protein interaction involved in the coronavirus infection, and about 1/5 of them were targets of existing drugs or could be used for developing therapies for COVID-19. This paper was completed by an international team of about 100 researchers, of which Zhou Yuan, an alumna who graduated in 2017 from Statistics Programme of UIC, was a member of the research.

Another year and another class of graduating students will say goodbye to their alma mater and start a new journey. The four years spent at UIC is some of the best years of their life. How many stories and sceneries have been treasured along the way? How much hard work has paid off? Following is the sharing of Year 4 Statistics student, Chen Xin.

A total of 57 teams of UIC students won awards at the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) and the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) 2020, and the number of Meritorious Winners and Honourable Mentions' winners reached a record high. These students are from the Division of Science and Technology (DST) and the Division of Business and Management (DBM), of which five teams were selected for the Meritorious Winners, while 10 teams received the Honourable Mentions, and 42 teams won the Successful Participants award.

The Division of Science and Technology (DST) welcomed two guest speakers on 5 December. The first speaker was Dr Wang Dan, who is an Assistant Professor of Finance at New York University Shanghai (NYU Shanghai) and also a Global Network Assistant Professor, New York University. Following her was Research Fellow at the School of Data Science at Fudan University, Dr Chen Zhao.

The lecture theatre was packed full of students and faculty members who were all eager to listen to the Division of Science and Technology (DST) distinguished guest Prof Tze Leung Lai on 4 December. Prof Tze Leung Lai is the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Statistics and by courtesy, also of Biomedical Data Science, and Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University.