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This international workshop was held in Beijing, China, April 18-22, 2011, hosted by the Probability Group of Beijing Normal University. There were 33 invited talks and more than 60 participants.
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The purpose of the Workshop was to bring together worldwide experts in fields related to branching processes, coalescent processes, random trees, measure-valued processes and stochastic partial differential equations to communicate and discuss their recent contributions. The schedule was arranged to encourage an informal workshop atmosphere with time for interactions. The talks presented at the Workshop stimulated lively discussions and opened new collaborations among the participants.
There were many young researchers and graduate students among the participants. The programs, speakers, talks, abstracts, slides and some pictures can be found at: http://math.bnu.edu.cn/probab/Workshop2011/
The financial support was provided by the Natural Science Foundation and the Ministry of Education in China.
Jean Bertoin (Paris) and Zenghu Li (Beijing)
Ninety-five researchers met at the University of Copenhagen in the days August 17-19, 2011, for a conference on "Dynamic Statistical Models". The conference was a Bernoulli Society satellite meeting before the 58th World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute held in Dublin. It was organized in the framework of the project "Statistical methods for complex and high dimensional models" under the University of Copenhagen Programme of Excellence. Elsevier sponsored two travel awards that supported the participation of two young researchers.
The meeting, which brought together researchers working on frontier research topics in the area of statistics for dynamic models, was focused on the following themes:
•Causality in dynamic models
•Functional data analysis
•Stochastic differential equations
•Neurophysiological processes
•Gene regulatory processes
•Event history data
Thirty-five speakers contributed to the exciting programme, including the 10
invited speakers:
•André Fujita, RIKEN
•Antoine Chambaz, Université Paris Descartes
•Emery N. Brown, MIT
•Jin-Ting Zhang, National University of Singapore
•Markus Reiß, Humboldt-University of Berlin
•Robert Kass, Carnegie Mellon
•Sara van de Geer, ETH
•Shuangge Ma, Yale
•Stijn Vansteelandt, Ghent University
•Torben Martinussen, University of Copenhagen.
All participants that I talked to enjoyed the pleasant and dynamic atmosphere with a lot of informal discussions in the breaks, and I think it is safe to say that all who attended the conference dinner at the micro brewery "Nørrebro Bryghus" had a great evening in the best Danish tradition. The meeting was organized by Susanne Ditlevsen, Claus Ekstrøm, Niels R. Hansen, Niels Keiding, Anders Krogh, Thomas Scheike and Ib Skovgaard.
Michael Sørensen.
The most recent ISI World Statistics Congress was held in Dublin, Ireland, in August 2011. The Congress was preceded by a very successful weekend satellite meeting, the first International Meeting of Young Statisticians (YSI 2011), intended for early career statisticians. The aim was to promote the active participation of early career statisticians in the epicentre of the ISI World Congress. Trinity College Dublin provided a beautiful, central and fitting location for the meeting; over 150 delegates were in attendance, from 44 different countries representing all 6 inhabited continents!
Oral presentations were given by eight invited lecturers (Sir David Cox, Peter Guttorp, Valerie Isham, Rajan Patel, Adrian Raftery, Jonathan Taylor, Martin Wainwright) and poster presentations were made by the attending delegates. The presenters, talks and posters represented both genders and a wide range of nationalities, and statistical areas. In particular, the statistical focus of the invited talks ranged from Google's uses of statistics (Rajan Patel), to the statistics of probabilistic weather forecasting (Adrian Raftery) and statistical climate modeling (Peter Guttorp) modeling to stochastic process models (Valerie Isham). High dimensional data problems were a theme of several presentations (including Martin Wainwright's) and the topical LASSO was also discussed (Jonathon Taylor). The meeting closed with an invited talk by Sir David Cox who shared his reflections on the interplay between theory and application in statistics. All the invited presentations provoked stimulating discussions from the audience.
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| Sir David Cox addresses the young statisticians at YSI 2011 |
A special focus of the meeting was on poster presentations. Several poster sessions ran throughout the meeting, which provided excellent opportunities for delegates to mix and share their thoughts and work in a friendly and supportive environment. Moreover, the poster sessions offered delegates the opportunity to meet and chat with the esteemed invited speakers. Professor Adrian Raftery chaired a judging panel of invited speakers for the award of prizes to the five best posters, with funding kindly provided by Science Foundation Ireland. The five prize winners were Karthik Bharath (University of Connecticut), Nicholas Chamandy (Google), Jennifer Gillespie (University of Ulster), Damien McParland (University College Dublin) and Anton Westveld (University of Nevada, Las Vegas). Their topics were representative of the spectrum of statistical areas represented at the meeting - from semi-martingale models, to large data streams, health care applications, clustering problems and financial data modeling.
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| Karthik Bharath receiving his prize from Adrian Raftery |
As a meeting for early career statisticians, the social aspects of the meeting were of great interest. Many attendees sampled the very best of Irish food, drink, hospitality and culture, with some even visiting the birthplace of the Student t distribution (i.e., the Guinness Brewery). A conference dinner was held in the historic Dining Room in Trinity College Dublin; the meal was prefaced by the traditional Latin grace.
The meeting was kindly supported by the Bernoulli Society, among several others, including the Irish Statistical Association, the Royal Statistical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Environmetric Society, Google, and, of course, the International Statistical Institute. Without this support the meeting would not have materialized.
Feedback from both invited speakers and delegates suggests that the meeting was a great success and we hope that it will establish a tradition of such satellite meetings in future ISI World Congresses.
Victor M. Panaretos
(Chair of the Scientific Program Committee)
Claire Gormley
(Chair of the Local Organizing Committee)
The 17th European Young Statisticians Meeting (EYSM) was held in Caparica, Lisbon, between the 5th and the 9th of September, 2011 – http://www.fct.unl.pt/17eysm.
These conferences are organized every two years under the auspices of the European Regional Committee of the Bernoulli Society. The aim is to provide a scientific forum for the next generation of European researchers in probability theory and statistics. It represents an excellent opportunity to promote new collaborations and international cooperation. Participants are less than 30 years old or have 2 to 8 years of research experience, and are invited on the basis of their scientific skills, in a uniformly distributed way in Europe (2 participants per country).
This is the first time we had the pleasure to host the EYSM in Portugal. We had 46 young statisticians registered (45 attended) from 24 different European countries. This represents the highest number of participants and countries since the beginning of the EYSM. We had 4 Keynote Speakers: Wolfgang Polasek (Austria); Carlos Agra Coelho (Portugal) who kindly replaced N. Balakrishnan who had to cancel his trip to Portugal due to personal matters; Maria Ivette Gomes (Portugal); and Kamil Feridun Turkman (Portugal), to whom we would like to thank for being in our meeting.
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The program also included four social events which allowed the participants to know each other and to have a taste of the Portuguese culture, weather, gastronomy and hospitality. On Monday afternoon, the welcome drink was held on the beach “Praia Morena” followed by dinner.
The conference dinner was held in a cruise on the Tagus River. It included 3.5 hours nonstop sailing along the margins of the beautiful Lisbon by night, and four Fado music singers.
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The conference excursion took place on Thursday afternoon and the program was called “Lisbon in pictures”, a Lisbon Treasure Hunt to see and experience the best of Lisbon; the Discoverers City. The dinner followed the excursion.
Three awards were given to the best three papers. The award committee was formed by Miguel de Carvalho, Paulo Canas Rodrigues, Anne Leucht and Alicia Nieto. The awardees were: Francesca Ieva (Italy); Johanna Ziegel (Germany) and Olivier Bouaziz (France).
A satisfaction survey was designed to know how happy the participants were about many of the items along the conference, and how it could be improved for next editions. We had 29 respondents out of the 45 participants. Some answers (contact with the organizers; welcome drink and dinner; conference dinner; excursion; organization staff support; overall quality of the social program; level of satisfaction with the 17th EYSM; level of satisfaction with the trip to Portugal) had to be rounded to 10 to fit the original scale (from 10+, 10++, 10+++, 20, 50 and infinity). We are very happy that some of the comments on the satisfaction survey were such as "A week full of fun and inspiration"; "I will remember it all my life"; "One of the best and most motivating conferences that I have been to”, etc.!
The Full Final Report on the 17th EYSM can be found in the ISI news: http://isi-web.org/images/news/2011-BS-Sept-Report17thEYSM.pdf
The 18th Edition of the European Young Statisticians Meeting will take place in the beautiful city of Osijek, Croatia. The Local Organizing Committee will be chaired by Nenad Suvak (Department of Mathematics, J.J. Strossmayer University of Osijek). We wish them the best of luck!
Paulo Canas Rodrigues
Chairman of Local Organizing Committee