Meet Bor-Kuan Song, Statistics summer scholar

Every year, the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland offers summer scholarships to a number of students so they can work with our staff on real-world projects.  Hongbin is working with Dr. Steffen Klaere on a project called Comparing and visualising measures of biodiversity. Bor-Kuan (below) explains:

“Our project is about acquiring and modifying data on biodiversity in New Zealand and possibly combining them into a visualisation in the form of maps. We will try look into the interaction between and within New Zealand birds, plants and soil compositions. “As technology develops and the availability of web storage space increases, it becomes easier to compare data from different sources. This presents an opportunity to assess the biodiversity in the NZ ecosystem, and have a better understanding of it.

“I’m studying a Bachelor of Science majoring in Statistics and Computer Science, and I’ve already finished a Bachelor of Music majoring in accordion performance. I’m into maths as well and have done most of the Stage II maths courses. My goal is to do actuarial studies, and so statistics, and, in part, computer science, will be a big part of it.”