Stan attribution

logo_textbottom

I worry that I get too much credit for Stan. So let me clarify. I didn’t write Stan. Stan is written in C++, and I’ve never in my life written a line of C, or C+, or C++, or C+++, or C-, or any of these things.

Here’s a quick description of what we’ve all done, listed in order of joining the development team.

• Andrew Gelman (Columbia University)
chief of staff, chief of marketing, chief of fundraising, chief of modeling, chief of training, max marginal likelihood, expectation propagation, posterior analysis, R, founder

• Bob Carpenter (Columbia University)
language design, parsing, code generation, autodiff, templating, ODEs, probability functions, con- straint transforms, manual, web design / maintenance, fundraising, support, training, C++, founder

• Matt Hoffman (Adobe Creative Technologies Lab)
NUTS, adaptation, autodiff, memory management, (re)parameterization, C++, founder

• Daniel Lee (Columbia University)
chief of engineering, CmdStan (founder), builds, continuous integration, testing, templates, ODEs, autodiff, posterior analysis, probability functions, error handling, refactoring, C++, training

• Ben Goodrich (Columbia University)
RStan, multivariate probability functions, matrix algebra, (re)parameterization, constraint trans- forms, modeling, R, C++, training

• Michael Betancourt (University of Warwick)
chief of smooth manifolds, MCMC, Riemannian HMC, geometry, analysis and measure theory, ODEs, CmdStan, CDFs, autodiff, transformations, refactoring, modeling, variational inference, logos, web design, C++, training

• Marcus Brubaker (University of Toronto, Scarborough)
optimization routines, code efficiency, matrix algebra, multivariate distributions, C++

• Jiqiang Guo (NPD Group)
RStan (founder), C++, Rcpp, R

• Peter Li (Columbia University)
RNGs, higher-order autodiff, ensemble sampling, Metropolis, example models, C++

• Allen Riddell (Dartmouth College)
PyStan (founder), C++, Python

• Marco Inacio (University of São Paulo)
functions and distributions, C++

• Jeffrey Arnold (University of Washington)
emacs mode, pretty printing, manual, emacs

• Rob J. Goedman (D3Consulting b.v.)
parsing, Stan.jl, C++, Julia

• Brian Lau (CNRS, Paris)
MatlabStan, MATLAB

• Mitzi Morris (Lucidworks)
parsing, testing, C++

• Rob Trangucci (iSENTIUM)
max marginal likelihood, multilevel modeling and poststratification, template metaprogramming, training, C++, R

• Jonah Sol Gabry (Columbia University)
shinyStan (founder), R

• Alp Kucukelbir (Columbia University)
variational inference, C++

• Robert L. Grant (St. George’s, University of London & Kingston University)
StataStan, Stata

• Dustin Tran (Havard University)
variational inference, C++

Development Team Alumni

These are developers who have made important contributions in the past, but are no longer contributing actively.

• Michael Malecki (Crunch.io, YouGov plc)
original design, modeling, logos, R

• Yuanjun Guo (Columbia University)
dense mass matrix estimation, C++

10 thoughts on “Stan attribution

  1. Because Andrew blogs from the past, this was out of date when published. I edited the post above to reflect two additions:

    1. Robert L. Grant (St. George’s, University of London & Kingston University) — he wrote StataStan

    2. Dustin Tran (Havard Uni) — he’s been working with Alp on variational inference.

    We keep an up-to-date list with no delay on the web site: Stan Team

  2. It’s testament to what can be achieved now with free tools like Github and Google Groups! Apart from once talking to Ben Goodrich for about a minute, I’ve yet to meet any of my Stan-mates. Anyone dreaming up a good software idea should just get on and build it collaboratively like this (not to underestimate the importance of clear goals and a chunk of central funding).

Leave a Reply to Daniel Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *