Dear all,

The following seminars will be taking place as organised by the RSS Leeds Bradford local group, no registration required in advance, all welcome.

1. Wednesday 31st October 2012 - "Adaptive designs in clinical trials" - Jointly with the Clinical Trials Research Unit, University of Leeds. 
The meeting will be held at University of Leeds, Worsley Building, Level 8, Room X, with refreshments and registration from 2pm and presentations until 5pm.

2. Wednesday 7th November 2012 - "Statistics of academic performance"
The meeting will be held at University of Leeds, Worsley Building, Level 9, Room 9.27, with refreshments from 3pm and presentations 3:30pm until 5pm.

Further details can be found below and also on our webpage:
http://tinyurl.com/rss-lba

Thanks,
Sarah

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Dr. Sarah Fleming
Secretary/Treasurer, RSS Leeds/Bradford Local Group, Division of Biostatistics, LIGHT, School of Medicine, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
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1. Wednesday 31st October 2012, 2pm until 5pm, University of Leeds, Worsley Building, Level 8, Room X.

Adaptive designs in clinical trials, 

James Wason, MRC Biostatistics Unit (Cambridge)
Design of Multi-Arm Multi-Stage Trials

Dena Cohen, CTRU (Leeds)
Incorporating Emerging Therapies into Ongoing Randomised Clinical Trials

Patrick Phillips, MRC Clinical Trials Unit (London)
Adaptive Trial Designs for Late-Phase Clinical Trials to Improve the Treatment of Tuberculosis

Helen Marshall, CTRU (Leeds)
Incorporation of an Additional Interim Analysis During the Running of a Randomised Clinical Trial Using Group Sequential Design Methodology

The meeting will be held at University of Leeds, Worsley Building, Level 8, Room X, with refreshments and registration from 2:00pm.
(see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/campusmap for directions)

2. Wednesday 7th November 2012, 3:30pm until 5pm, University of Leeds, Worsley Building, Level 9, Room 9.27.

Statistics of academic performance

Darren Greenwood, (Division of Biostatistics, LIGHT, University of Leeds)

Reliability of journal impact factor rankings

Journal impact factors and their ranks are widely used by journals, university researchers of all disciplines, and will be used either formally or informally in the imminent Research Excellence Framework (REF). However, these estimates and their ranks are often based on quite small numbers, and their precision is never considered. In this talk I apply methods to assess this that are more commonly used in education and in medical research. Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to estimate the uncertainty associated with these journal performance indicators and to compare journals. Alternative methods will also be mentioned. I discuss to what extent decisions placed on journal impact factors are potentially misleading where the uncertainty associated with the measure is ignored and how this could be improved in future.

Brian Cattle, (Division of Biostatistics, LIGHT, University of Leeds)

Maximising Revenue from the Research Excellence Framework (REF)

The REF is the new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. It replaces the Research Assessments Exercise and will be conducted in 2014. With a desire to maximise the potential financial returns within the specific submission rules for research output, we have used Statistical methods to devise software to maximise the financial return, or the grade point (star rating) of the overall submission within the unit of assessment. Because the final submission of many authors is not yet fixed, we also required methods to examine various contingencies and the effects that these might have on the REF income. Furthermore, because each paper submitted may have more than one author in the same unit of assessment, it is necessary to decide which authors should be permitted to return each paper in order to improve the overall income. In this talk, we discuss some of the complexities of the REF optimisation software.

The meeting will be held at University of Leeds, Worsley Building, Level 9, Room 9.27, with refreshments from 3pm and presentations from 3:30pm until 5:00pm.

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