Member of NAE and of Academia Sinica; Fellow of ASA, ASQ, IMS, INFORMS
Chien-Fu Jeff Wu (born 1949) is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on the convergence of the EM algorithm,[2] resampling methods such as the bootstrap and jackknife, and industrial statistics, including design of experiments, and robust parameter design (Taguchi methods).
Born in Taiwan, Wu earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1971, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from University of California, Berkeley in 1976. He has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1977–1988), the University of Waterloo (1988–1993; GM-NSERC chair in quality and productivity), the University of Michigan (1995–2003; chair of Department of Statistics 1995–98; H.C. Carver professor of statistics, 1997–2003) and currently the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has supervised 50 Ph.D. students[3] and published around 185 peer-reviewed articles and two books.[4][5]
In 1985, in a lecture given to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, he used the term Data Science for the first time as an alternative name for statistics.[17] Later, in November 1997, he gave the inaugural lecture entitled "Statistics = Data Science?"[18] for his appointment to the H. C. Carver Professorship at the University of Michigan.[19] He popularized the term "data science" and advocated that statistics be renamed data science and statisticians data scientists.[18]
He also presented his lecture entitled "Statistics = Data Science?" as the first of his 1998 P.C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lectures.[20] These lectures honor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, an Indian scientist and statistician and founder of the Indian Statistical Institute.
In Mile, Yunnan, China, a conference was held in July 2014 celebrating Professor Wu's 65th birthday.[21] In 2014 he gave the Bradley Lecture at the University of Georgia.[22] In 2016 he was the inaugural recipient of the Akaike Memorial Lecture Award.[23] In 2017 Jeff Wu received the George Box Medal from ENBIS.[24] In 2020, Jeff Wu received Georgia Institute of Technology’s highest award given to a faculty member: the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award.[25] In the same year, he also got the Sigma Xi’s Monie A. Ferst Award which, since 1977, has honored science and engineering teachers who have inspired their students to significant research achievements.[26][27] In 2020 he delivered the CANSSI/Fields Distinguished Lectures Series in Statistical Sciences.[28]
^"Akaike Memorial Lecture of The Institute of Statistical Mathematics and the Japan Statistical Society", The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, accessed September 24, 2016,http://www.ism.ac.jp/events/2016/meeting0905e.html.
