The federal Brain Initiative aims to revolutionize understanding of the human brain through development of innovative technologies. The new data being generated pose new challenges for statistical and machine learning methods. Carnegie Mellon University‘s Statisics Professor and CNBC faculty member Rob Kass chaired a working group of the American Statistical Association (pdf) that articulated these challenges. Together with Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. (MIT and Harvard Medical School), they were interviewed by Sam Behseta Professor of Mathematics ( California State University, Fullerton) for Chance magazine. Kass and Brown’s book Analysis of Neural Data was published last year.