While shopping around for statistics PhD programs to apply for, I found it strange that MIT seemed like the only "name" school that didn't have a program. So n=1, but seems to me that they recognize that they are losing out by not having a formal stats PhD program.
Edit: Just noticed on page 20 that one of the discarded name proposals for the new program was the "Institute for Statistics and Information Systems (ISIS)."
That was also my impression, especially considering that CMU has a Machine Learning department (above and beyond their existing Stats Dept.) and there are Data Science Master's programs popping up all around. Get on the bus!
The politics and turf battles must be fascinating, because if there is one (technical) discipline that feels encroached-upon and under-appreciated, it's statistics. Finally, some appreciation, and they'd hate to cede any control to (say) a bunch of upstarts from the CS dept. who wouldn't know a James-Stein estimator from Adam.
This is interesting news. It seems that all the big companies and universities are equipping themselves to tackle the data problem at a larger scale. I wonder if this is because companies like Google/Facebook/Baidu found themselves ahead of academia when tackling problems at large scale. Or perhaps data warehouses are bursting at the seams with useful information waiting for qualified people to analyze them.
I'm a grad student in the department this is replacing, but will be continuing on to the PhD program in EECS.
I'm really excited to see this happening, the department it was replacing needed a bit of help and it's good to see MIT doubling down on the idea that sociotechnical systems are worth studying.
I found it when trying to discover who their new Statistics strategic hire is. The possibility of a PhD in Stats from MIT is weird.