Draft:Karl Rohe

Karl Rohe is an American statistician and computer scientist, currently serving as a Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is known for his contributions to the fields of statistical learning, network analysis, and machine learning, with a particular focus on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and embeddings.

Education and Career

Rohe received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Professor Bin Yu. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he has risen to the rank of full professor in the Department of Statistics.

Appointments and Affiliations

Professor Rohe holds courtesy appointments in several departments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison:

- The School of Journalism and Mass Communication

- Electrical & Computer Engineering

- Educational Psychology

He is also part of a broad community of machine learning researchers at UW Madison and is affiliate faculty for IFDS (Institute for Foundations of Data Science). Previously, he served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (JRSS-B).

Research

Professor Rohe's research interests lie at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and network analysis. His work is motivated by the changing nature of data analysis, focusing on the transition from traditional experimental statistics to modern data science approaches. Key areas of his research include:

1. Making Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and embeddings more accessible and interpretable

2. Exploring the connections between embeddings and spectral techniques

3. Adapting statistical methods for the era of big data and data science

He describes his approach as "making things for statisticians from things that are very old (PCA and varimax) and very new (Large Language Models)."

Teaching and Mentorship

At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Professor Rohe teaches courses in statistics and data science. He is known for his dedication to student mentorship and his ability to explain complex concepts in accessible ways.

External Links

- University profile page - Google Scholar profile - Twitter: @karlrohe - BlueSky: @karlrohe