I have had the chance to meet Brett a couple of times, including for the anniversary of the Department of Statistics in Dublin. A very nice person. These are sad news.
Regards,
cassio.

________________________________________
From: SIPTA [sipta-bounces@mailman2.ti-edu.ch] on behalf of Alessandro Antonucci [alessandro@idsia.ch]
Sent: 23 September 2019 17:04
To: sipta@idsia.ch
Subject: [SIPTA] Brett Houlding

Forwarding a message from Frank Coolen, remembering our colleague Brett Houlding.

=====================================

Dear friends,

I would like to make the community aware of the sudden and untimely
passing away of Brett Houlding on 14 September. Brett completed the
MMATH degree at Durham in 2004 and then studied for PhD, it was my
pleasure to supervise him. He completed his PhD in 2008 with a thesis
entitled 'Sequential decision making with adaptive utility'. Brett made
some contributions to imprecision, but in my view his main achievements
are in decision theory.

His thesis sets out foundations, theory and methods for sequential Bayesian
decision theory where one also learns about ones utilities throughout
the process. This aspect of decision theory has received surprisingly little
attention, although it is relevant in many scenarios, e.g. should one visit a
new restaurant, how serious are possible effects of system failure, what
are side effects of new medication? In his thesis, Brett provided the starting
points of a nice and powerful theory, with many research challenges remaining.

After completing his PhD, Brett moved to Trinity College Dublin, first as
PostDoc researcher and followed by an Assistant Professorship. This was
in years of economic downturn in Ireland, with universities strongly affected.
With only few colleagues Brett managed to keep an excellent undergraduate
programme running, and he also supervised three students to PhD:
Donnacha Bolger ('Reliability updating in linear opinion pooling with
multiple decision makers', 2016), Shuaiwei Zhou ('Bayesian modelling
and analysis of utility-based maintenance for repairable systems', 2017)
and Angela McCourt ('Modelling uncertainty and vagueness within
recommender systems via nonparametric predictive inference', 2019).
He also collaborated successfully on applied statistics projects with
external collaborators, which led to a range of high impact publications,
in particular in the field of species richness assessment.

About a year ago, Brett moved to an Associate Professor position
at University College Cork, also in Ireland, where he looked
forward to more research opportunities and a happy family life.
I am happy to have known Brett, he was a hard-working, intelligent
and nice person who will be greatly missed by all who knew him.

Frank Coolen

=====================================

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