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Media interest in our research, or in research based on our research.

7 August 2025

Fig 3 form Trevail et al. 2025
The importance of VLMPA (Very Large Marine Protected Areas) for marine conservation is highlighted by the Spanish online news site La Republica (Republic) in The Chagos Archipelago: A vital refuge for endangered marine species [in Spanish]: "A study conducted in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean reveals that 95% of the tracking sites for [manta rays, seabirds and turtles] were located within the 640,000 square kilometer MPA, suggesting that this area is large enough to protect their migratory life cycles."

This post in turn refers to the work of Trevail et al. Large marine protected areas can encompass movements of diverse megafauna, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. They employ the geospatial kernel maps in the eks R package to quantify 95% of the range of manta rays, seabirds and turtles within the Chagos Archipelago MPA, as reproduced from their Figure 3(c).

15 May 2025

The French regional newspaper Le Progrès (Progress) report on innovative forms of transport in Ride-sharing is another way to get to work in Lyon [in French]. It describes how real-time ride-sharing provides a viable alternative for suburban residents to travel to/from their workplace in downtown Lyon, the second largest city in France. An analysis of this ride-sharing service, by Ray & Khedira in Results from a resilient citizen-based instant carpooling public service published in Transportation Research Procedia, cites our work on reducing passenger wait times.

29 Nov 2024

Fig S3 form Nishiyama et al. 2018
The Bluesky post (a repost from an earlier tweet) by Jan De Vries reminds us about the influential Chara Genome project, first published several years ago in Cell as The Chara genome: secondary complexity and implications for plant terrestrialization. This project gave insights into the evolutionary history of land plants: "A pivotal event in the emergence of plant life was the mid-Paleozoic adaptation to land. While several algal lineages evolved to occupy terrestrial environments, only one represents the land plant ancestor... Charophytic algae are the closest living relatives of land plants."

This project uses the feature R package and the feature significance methodology to mitigate overfitting when searching for whole genome duplication (WGD) events, as shown in the partial reprodcution of their Figure S3.

30 April 2023

KDEs of Iris data groups
In a StackOverflow post entitled Visualising scatterplot with too many points and two or more groups, a solution using the density contours of kernel density estimates is offered by the user utobi to the problem of visualisation of dense data point clouds from different groups. The solution refers to our book Multivariate Kernel Smoothing and Its Applications and ks R package.

22 March 2023

In an opinion piece The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory (PDF for those without paywall access), penned by academic and journalist Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times, explores the ramifications of the data-based research on voting blocs in US elections carried out by Grimmer, Marble & Tanigawa-Lau. Edsall writes that "The data, Grimmer continued, point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it."

From their research pre-print Measuring the contribution of voting blocs to election outcomes, they calculate this crucial size of voting blocs using the ks R package. (EDIT: this research is published in The Journal of Politics in July 2025).

26 July 2022

Fig 2 from Worobey et al.
The research journal Science reports on the early stages of the Covid-19 epidemic in The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic:

"Worobey et al. amassed the variety of evidence from the City of Wuhan, China, where the first human infections were reported. These reports confirm that most of the earliest human cases centered around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Within the market, the data statistically located the earliest human cases to one section where vendors of live wild animals congregated and where virus-positive environmental samples concentrated."

The authors produced maps of the infection spatial distribution, such as their Figure 2(B) reproduced here. The acknowledgment to the ks package is made explicit in the Supplementary material.

19 March 2020

MVKSA book cover
A/Prof Qing Wang of Wellesley College, USA raves about our book Multivariate Kernel Smoothing and Its Applications in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. A/Prof Wang writes that

"it was a great joy for me to review this book. It was written beautifully. The authors offered many valuable insights on multivariate kernel smoothing, which I found helpful. I am looking forward to having a copy on my bookshelf and I have no doubt that it will be my research reference book in the future."

Read her complete review.

03 June 2010

Fig 2 from Schauer et al. 2010
Les Echos (French daily newspaper) writes an enthuastic report abour our Nature Methods article on the cellular maps calculated by the ks R package for an emerging biotechnology. An example of these cellular maps is a reproduction of Fig 1 (b-e). A translation of an excerpt of the original news report Updated cellular traffic maps [in French]:

"We can't imagine the incredible traffic that exists inside a living cell. A team from the Curie Institute, headed by Bruno Goud, has just solved part of the mystery in creating `global maps of all the cellular compartments and the relationships between them'. In research published in Nature Methods they confirm that it is possible to analyse globally the disruption of cellular compartments in pathological cases. The researchers have used an emerging biotechonology to solve this puzzle. The test cells were adhered to a support medium and were analysed using microscope imaging. This work is being continued for tumour cells, because these scientists believe that the change in `certain master proteins in this arrangement are involved in tumorigenesis.'"