Professor Benjamin Kedem of the Mathematics Department, University of Maryland, has touched many lives, both personally, and through his contributions to the fields of statistics and applied probability.  This symposium, in his honor, is an opportunity for his students, colleagues, and other researchers to gather and share cross-disciplinary techniques that can have a profound effect on the future of data analysis.

Benjamin Kedem received a B.S. Degree (1968) in Mathematics from Roosevelt University, and M.S. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) degrees in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. He was a Lecturer at the University of Haifa and an Adjunct Lecturer at Hebrew University from 1972 to 1975.  He came to the Department of Mathematics of the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor in 1975 and was promoted to Professor in 1990. From 1982 to 1984, he was a Visiting Senior Scientist at REFAEL in Israel, and was also a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) (1993), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (1995-1996), and has been affiliated with the National Center for Health Statistics since 2004.

Dr. Kedem's research has been recognized by many awards, including an award from the Armament Development Authority, Israel (1984); the 1988 IEEE Baker Award for the most outstanding paper ("Spectral Analysis and Discrimination by Zero Crossings," Proceedings of the IEEE, 1986); a NASA/Goddard Exceptional Achievement Award for his work related to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (1997); and an IBM Faculty Award (2006). He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Professor Kedem has published 70 journal articles in statistics, engineering, and scientific journals, as well as 21 articles in proceedings of symposia, conferences, and book chapters. In addition, he has published three widely used books on time series analysis, Binary Time Series (1980, Marcel Dekker), Time Series Analysis by Higher Order Crossings (1994, IEEE Press), and Regression Models for Time Series Analysis (2002, Wiley).

Dr. Kedem is also affiliated with the University of Maryland's Institute for Systems Research, which is home to cross-disciplinary research and education programs in systems engineering and sciences, and is committed to developing basic solution methodologies and tools for system problems in a variety of application domains.  That Dr. Kedem's research has had cross-disciplinary impact is evidenced not only by his various publications and awards, but also in the works of the many students that he has trained.

James Troendle,

NIH

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