Homepage of Russell G Almond
This is the homepage of Russell G Almond, a polymath with many interests, and a wizened old man.
Professional
Russell Almond has a PhD in Statistics, and whose research focuses on the intersection between artificial intelligence and statistics. He is currently an Associate Professor
of Measurement & Statistics in the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning System, in the College of Education, Health, and Human Services at Florida State University.
He received a PhD in Statistics from Harvard University in 1990, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Caltech in 1983.
Before coming to FSU, he worked at Educational Testing Service for 14 years. Prior to that, he worked at StatSci, which became MathSoft (and after Russell left, Insightful).
A more complete bio can be found here.
Evidence-Centered Assessment Design
Together with Bob Mislevy and Linda Steinberg, Russell Almond developed the early versions of evidence-centered assessment design (ECD). This early work has been extended in many ways by many people.
The subdomain ecd.ralmond.net will contain the rehomed ECD wiki, a set of materials for students of ECD as well as a place for the ECD community to exchange ideas.
Software
As part of his PhD dissertation, he developed BELIEF a program written in Lisp for working with graphical belief functions (BELIEF was archived in various collections of early AI software). While at StatSci which became MathSoft, he worked on an extension called GRAPHICAL-BELIEF, which included a user interface written in Garnet (which alas is no more). There are still some interesting ideas in the user interface, and the link above leads to a prototype user manual.
While at ETS, Russell worked with Linda Steinberg on the development of Portal, a collection of tools for building ECD models. ETS no longer develops or supports Portal, but many of the ideas from Portal have gone into other ECD tools. He also worked on StatShop a system written in java implementing many of the ideas in Bayesian Networks in Educational Assessment.
More recently, he has build a collection of R packages for working with parameterized Bayesian networks (p-nets) called Peanut. An important part of that is the package RNetica which provides a binding for the Netica(r) Bayes net library.
The R packages in the Proc4 bundle build on the Peanut Bayes net software to produce a scoring system for Bayesian networks. This is in the process of being rebranded EvidenceStream to express its role in streaming scoring systems.
Compiled versions of the software are available from https://ralmond.r-universe.dev. The source code for these and other projects can be found on Github: https://github.com/ralmond.
Books and Papers
He is the author of two books: Graphical Belief Modeling and Bayesian Networks in Educational Assessment
His ORCID is 0000-0002-8876-9337.
His Google scholar page is here and his offical FSU Vita can be found here
The Pubs page lists his publications with links to those that can be found online.
Music
Russell is a musician and composer who plays bassoon, recorder, and variety of historic instruments, and sings (Tenor II/Baritone). He is currently music director (and does sound effects and music) for Theater with a Mission.
Some of his compositions (and videos of him playing) can be found on the music page.
Other
Some pictures of Russell & Family are available in the gallery.
Work in progress
This is very much a work in progress. Stay tuned for updates.