Welcome!

Hello! and welcome to my home page. I am a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Statistics and Department of Health and Research Policy. I am also the Director of the Data Coordinating Center in the Department of Health Research and Policy. I am often asked how my name should be pronounced. My friends usually call me ``Naras'', but here are some recordings of my full name in various formats. SGI format name.aiff Sun format name.au NeXT format name.snd Microsoft RIFF Waveform format name.wav MuLaw format name.u ALaw format name.al PS. I'm clueless about the last two formats.

Balasubramanian Narasimhan

My PGP Public Key

Our Departmental Address

We have now moved to a new building and my complete address is:

Room 139, Sequoia Hall
390 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-4065
USA

Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM)

The SAM page.

Java Lectures

Between March 17 and 25, 1999, I attended the conference on Distributed Statistical Computing in Vienna, Austria. Here are some pictures from the conference, courtesy of Doug Bates. I am involved with the Omega Project.

Older stuff that still gets hit

I still see a number of hits on my old java programs. These relate to the talk I gave titled Interactive Instruction on the Web at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Chicago in August 1996. The software is available here.

The list of lunch talks I gave on various computing related stuff in our department is available here.

Departmental Computing Guide

I keep updating our department computing guide with whatever I feel is relevant and useful. The latest major addition is in the area of security. Be sure to check out the Computing Guide especially the section devoted to Security. There you will find information on kerberos and SSH. I have taken some pains to provide detailed documentation on using TTSSH, a good and free SSH client for Windows.

New Applets

1998/11/02New applets for Probability by Surprise are now available. Be sure to read the instructions on browser requirements.

The new applets for Stat 190 are available from the Stat 190 (Web Tools) page. This includes a printing mechanism for applets via a separate thread.

Research

1999/12/01Web Companion to the paper Bone mineral acquisition in healthy Asian, Hispanic, Black and Caucasian youth. A longitudinal study (with L. K. Bachrach, T. Hastie, M-C. Wang, R. Marcus), J. Clin. and Endocrinol. Metab., Volume 84, No. 12, 4702--4712, December 1999.

Dynamic Display of Changing Posterior in Bayesian Survival Analysis by Hani Doss and B. Narasimhan. This paper has appeared in Practical Nonparametric and Semiparametric Bayesian Statistics, P. Muller, D. Sinha, and D. Dey, eds., 1998, 63-87, Springer-Verlag. Software for the paper is now available from my programs section.

My research area is statistical computing. I develop and use modern tools for statistical computing. I love Lisp-Stat and I have contributed some code which can be found at Statlib as well as Jan de Leeuw's comprehensive Lisp-Stat archive at UCLA.

I maintain a page on various ongoing and contemplated projects in Lisp-Stat. Feel free to visit it. I will be substantially improving the page in some time.

I am interested in Bayesian Computing and the paper: Bayesian Poission Regression: Sensitivity Analysis through Dynamic Graphics deals with sensitivity in posteriors as the priors are varied. A new version of the software is in the works including many enhancements. Currently, the whole program is a literate program of about 150 pages and you can get it in its current state from here.

The Diehard Battery of Tests for Random Number Generators

I am also developing a GUI version of George Marsaglia's Diehard tests for Random Number Generators. Details will be posted on the Diehard home page.. You can see snapshots of Diehard here.

Lately I have been really into Java and Distributed Computing. I gave talks at Workshop on Data Visualization and Statistics at Drew University between July 6--10, and the Conference on Statistical Science and the Internet at the same place between July 13--15. There is a proceedings volume in the works for the latter.

Interesting Links

Technical

• Don Knuth's Web page.
• Luke Tierney's Web page.
• See my bookmarks. I need to organize these some day. However, I truly believe that Data Compression is a technology not just for Computing, but also for modern life. I achieve this compression by using other people's bookmarks :-).

My interests (non-technical)

• The Nirad C. Chaudhuri page.
• India Online. I especially like their superb web page on Indian Wildlife Parks.
• I was very happy to see the PBS nature series India: Land of the Tiger. Some years ago, my wife and I happened on a book by Valmik Thapar and Fateh Singh Rathore (Tigers: The secret life) on the tigers at the Ranthambore Wildlife refuge and were stunned by the information and photographs in it. What a wonderful present it was to see this television production! For more information, visit the Ranthambore Wildlife Foundation. It is fitting that Valmik Thapar is considered one of Nature's heroes.
• Peter Ravn Rassmussen's magnificent page containing great information on history.

Personal

My alma mater is Florida State University. I graduated from FSU Department of Statistics in 1991. (I get irrational when I talk about Seminole football!). My thesis advisor was George Marsaglia.

I met my wife, Kathryn, in Tallahassee, Florida, when I was still a graduate student. We have two daughters: Jaya (15+) and Sashi (12+).

I was an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College (1993--1996) and an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at University of Minnesota, Morris (1991-1993).

My main hobbies are music, tennis, and reading about history. I am especially interested in Indian history and personalities in Indian history.