About
Hi there, I’m Emi
I’m an applied, academic statistician at the Australian National University (ANU) living in Canberra with a passion for data science and open-source software.
What I do
My primary interest is to develop impactful methods and tools that can be readily used by practitioners. I enjoy working in a collaborative environment with people from diverse backgrounds, with an aim to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the real world data. I interface across multiple disciplines to bridge statistical concepts and findings to a broad range of individuals. To this end, I have developed numerous open-source tools, primarily as R-packages, and resources aimed at making statistical methods accessible to a diverse audience. My proudest work to date is the edibble R package where I reframe the specification of an experimental design by the so-called “grammar of experimental designs” (words = fundamental components of a comparative experiment, e.g. units, treatments and its relationships, and express design as a “sentence” by stringing together “words” that follow a certain grammatical rule).
Research interests
- Experimental design
- Mixed models also known as multi-level models, panel data models or hierarchical models
- Data visualisation and visual inference
- Bioinformatics and plant sciences particularly plant breeding
- Emerging analytics e.g. machine/deep learning, computer vision and large language models
- Statistical software development particularly in R
- Statistical workflow and practice encompassing reproducibility, design, infrastructure and communication
Community
I take a proactive approach to community development. I’m actively involved in the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA), International Biometrics Society (Australasian Region) and other committees. I recently completed my term as President of the SSA Victorian Branch where I led the creation of the Di Cook Award (an open source statistical software award for students) and the launch of the Statistical Computing and Visualisation Section within SSA. I also initiated a community initiative for developing software for crop analytics in the AAGIverse. My contributions have been recognised by the SSA Distinguished Presenter’s Award (2021), SSA Leadership in Statistics (2022) and I was featured on the list of 60 prominent Australian statisticians in the Significance magazine (2023).
Languages and tools
I speak English, Japanese (conversational) and R (base + tidyverse) fluently. I’ve lived in Australia almost all of my life (+-10 years standard deviation) and my university major was mathematics and statistics. Most of my code written during my PhD was in Python and Bash (both of which I am rusty now). I also like to dabble on front-end web development (HTML/CSS/JS). I’ve developed web apps using Shiny and practice computational reproducibility using Git, R Markdown (now Quarto) and internal DSLs (e.g. targets and renv R-packages). I’m a very data-oriented person to the extent that I’ve collected my own data via webscrapping and API. I adapt quickly and am quite open to taking new challenges – occasionally, I do text analysis and play in machine learning competitions. I’ve now also started to do research in computer vision and large language models.
Open science
I am a big advocate of open science and an avid research software engineer. My code are mostly available on my GitHub profile where I also host a number of R-packages that I have developed.
Contact
Please note that I will not respond to emails if I cannot identify who you are (i.e. not anonymous and has affiliation).