Meet Statistics summer scholar Kai Huang

Every year, the Department of Statistics offers summer scholarships to a number of students so they can work with staff on real-world projects. Kai, right, is working on a project called Constrained Additive Ordination with Dr Thomas Yee. Kai explains:

“In the early 2000s, Dr Thomas Yee proposed a new technique in the field of ecology called Constrained Additive Ordination (CAO) that solves the problems about the shape of species’ response curves and how they are distributed along unknown underlying gradients, and meanwhile the CAO-oriented Vector Generalised Linear and Additive Models (VGAM) package for R has been developed. This summer, I am compiling code for improving performance for the VGAM package by facilitating the integration of R and C++ under the R environment.

“This project brings me the chance to work with a package in worldwide use and stimulates me to learn more about writing R extensions and C++ compilation. I don’t have any background in ecology, but I acquired a lot before I started this project.

“I just have done the one-year Graduate Diploma in Science in Statistics at the University of Auckland after graduating from Massey University at Palmerston North with a Bachelor of Business Studies in Finance and Economics. In 2015, I’ll be doing an honours degree in Statistics. Statistics is used in every field, which is awesome to me.

“This summer, I’ll be spending my days rationally, working with numbers and codes, and at night, romantically, spending my spare time with stars. Seeing the movie Interstellar [a 2014 science-fiction epic that features a crew of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity] reignited my curiosity about the universe, and I have been reading astronomy and physics books in my spare time this summer. I even bought an annual pass to Stardome, the planetarium at Auckland, and have spent several evenings there.”