Tasos C Christofides Editor

Professor Arijit Chaudhuri (1940) has a Ph.D, M.A. and B.A. (Statistics) from Calcutta University(CU), was Lecturer in Statistics in Presidency College (1963-68) and CU (1968-77) and Associate Professor in Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) (1977-1981), a Professor at ISI (1982-2002) and Honorary Visiting Professor there since then including a position as CSIR Emeritus Scientist at ISI (2002-2005). He still regularly teaches B.Stat and M.Stat courses at ISI. Internationally he was a Post-Doc fellow at Sydney University (1973-75), a Visiting Professor (1989-1990) at Virginia Tech, Nebraska-Lincoln University (1997), Delft University (1985). Ha also worked on scientific assignments in Ottawa, Waterloo, Mannheim, Utrecht, Lund, Umea, Stockholm, Southampton, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Havana, Istanbul, Chiba, Durban (universities & Statistical Offices) intermittently over 1979-2009. He has successfully guided 10 Ph.D. students. He has published 10 books/monographs: Network & adaptive Sampling (2014) CRC Press Modern Survey Sampling (2014) CRC Press Indirect Questioning in sample surveys (with TC Christofides)(2013), Springer Verlag Randomized Response and Indirect Questioningtechniques in surveys (2011),CRC Press Essentials of Survey Sampling (2010), Prentice Hall of India Survey Sampling Theory & Methods (with H.Stenger) ( 1st edition, 1992,Marcel Dekker) 2nd revised and enhanced edition, 2005, CRC Press Randomized response theory & Techniques (1988) (with Rahul Mukerjee),Marcel Dekker Unified Theory and Strategies of Survey Sampling (1988)(with late JWE Vos), North Holland (Elsevier) Developing small Domain Statistics:Modeling in survey sampling; (2012) , e-Book, LAP, Saarbrucken, Germany In addition he has has published 125 peer-reviewed papers alone and jointly in journals including Biometrika, Int. Stat. Rev, Metrika, Stat. Neerlandica, Aust. J.Stat., JSPI, Comm. Stat (Theo. Meth and Comp. Simul), Sankhya, Cal. Stat. Assoc. Bull., J. Ind. Soc. Agri. Stat. Tasos C. Christofides is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Cyprus. He completed his Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 1987, under the supervision of Professor Robert Serfling. From 1987 until 1991 he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the State University of New York at Binghamton. In 1991 he joined the newly founded University of Cyprus and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, becoming its first Chairman. His areas of expertise include indirect questioning techniques and probability inequalities. He is co-author (with Professor Arijit Chaudhuri) of a recent book on Indirect Questioning Techniques in Sample Surveys (Springer, Heidelberg 2013) and author of a number of papers on randomized response and indirect questioning techniques in general. He serves on the editorial board of various journals of probability and statistics. He has participated in a number of research projects and has provided consulting services for various organizations including the Statistical Service of Cyprus. He serves on various national and international scientific and expert committees, among them, the European Statistical Advisory Committee. Professor C. R. Rao, born in India, is one of this century's foremost statisticians, and received his education in statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta. He is Emeritus Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics at Penn State and Director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis. He has long been recognized as one of the world's top statisticians, and has been awarded 34 honorary doctorates from universities in 19 countries spanning 6 continents. His research has influenced not only statistics, but also the physical, social and natural sciences and engineering. In 2011 he was recipient of the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Gold which is awarded triennially to those "who are judged to have merited a signal mark of distinction by reason of their innovative contributions to the theory or application of statistics". It can be awarded both to fellows (members) of the Society and to non-fellows. Since its inception 120 years ago the Gold Medal has been awarded to 34 distinguished statisticians. The first medal was awarded to Charles Booth in 1892. Only two statisticians, H. Cramer (Norwegian) and J. Neyman (Polish), outside Great Britain were awarded the Gold medal and C. R. Rao is the first non-European and non-American to receive the award. Other awards he has received are the Gold Medal of Calcutta University, Wilks Medal of the American Statistical Association, Wilks Army Medal, Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society (UK), Megnadh Saha Medal and Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal of the Indian National Science Academy, J.C.Bose Gold Medal of Bose Institute and Mahalanobis Centenary Gold Medal of the Indian Science Congress, the Bhatnagar award of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India and the Government of India honored him with the second highest civilian award, Padma Vibhushan, for “outstanding contributions to Science and Engineering / Statistics”, and also instituted a cash award in honor of C R Rao, “to be given once in two years to a young statistician for work done during the preceding 3 years in any field of statistics”. For his outstanding achievements Rao has been honored with the establishment of an institute named after him, C.R.Rao Advanced Institute for Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, in the campus of the University of Hyderabad, India.