BUFFALO, N.Y. — A prominent biostatistics researcher from the University at Buffalo is among a group of Greek- and Cypriot-born scholars from the U.S. and Canada who will travel to Greece to conduct academic projects with their peers at Greek universities, according to the buffalo.edu.

“Marianthi Markatou, professor and associate chair of research and health care informatics in UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions, was awarded a fellowship from the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program to work with a researcher from the Department of Statistics at Athens University of Economics and Business on joint research challenges at the interface of statistics and machine learning.

Markatou’s selection was based on her fundamental scientific contributions as well as on a “very rarely demonstrated knowledge of the three employment sectors: academia, industry and government,” according to the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program.

The project — titled “Big Data: Interface of Statistics and Machine Learning” — aims to open research collaborations with the graduate program in statistics and the program in information sciences at the Athens University of Economics and Business.

Discussions on developing and sustaining collaborations with UB’s programs in biostatistics and the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences are part of the planned activities.

The project incorporates a research component in addressing some of the foundational issues in big data analysis, based on Markatou’s previous groundbreaking work on statistical distances, their relationship with kernels and robustness aspects. It will address challenges from a perspective that incorporates statistical and machine learning aspects simultaneously.

Markatou, PhD, will collaborate with Karlis Dimitrios, professor in the Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business.

Markatou is one of 30 Greek- and Cypriot-born scholars from a cross section of 28 prominent U.S. and Canadian universities who are traveling to Greece. They will work in areas that range from medical physics to curriculum co-development in clinical neurophysiology, and from Anglo-American modernist poetry to educational psychology.”

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