2014 IISA Conference recognizes young researchers and PhD students

Subir Ghosh, University of California, Riverside, reports:

The International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Conference on Research Innovations in Statistics for Health, Education, Technology, and Society, was held July 11–13, 2014 at the Riverside Convention Center, in Riverside, California. Plenary speakers were Nicholas P. Jewell, UC Berkeley and Kathryn Roeder, Carnegie Mellon University. Special invited speakers were Sudipto Banerjee, University of Minnesota; Joyee Ghosh (Young Researcher), The University of Iowa; Ryan P. Hafen (Young Researcher, IISA President’s invited speaker on Big Data), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; William DuMouchel, Oracle Health Sciences; Marc A. Suchard, UC, Los Angeles; Adityanand Guntuboyina (Young Researcher), UC, Berkeley; Mark. J van der Laan, UC Berkeley; and Gourab Mukherjee (Young Researcher), University of Southern California. Distinguished researchers representing many countries as invited speakers include Ivan Mizera, University of Alberta, Canada; Regina Liu, Rutgers University; Mia Hubert, KU Leuven, Belgium; Jon A. Wellner, University of Washington, Seattle; Peter F. Thall, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Huston; Valerii V. Fedorov, Quintiles; Christine Müller, TU Dortmund University, Germany; Joseph Heyse, Merck Research Laboratories; Hira L. Koul, Michigan State University; and George Michailidis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Highly talented young researchers and fresh PhDs took the center stage at the conference along with mid-career prominent and senior distinguished researchers. Speakers were from academia, industries, research centers, and government organizations.

Biostatistics invited sessions include cancer research; drug development; clinical trials; enrichment strategy; healthcare; pharmacometrics and pharmacological modeling; incidence rate, life time and benefit risks; survival analysis; multiple testing; case control; disease diagnosis; genomics data; ‘-omics’ data; and selective genotyping.

Statistics invited sessions included several sessions on inference and learning in high dimension; graphical and network models; feature modeling, screening, and clustering; data depth; functional data; spatial statistics; large spatial and multivariate data; time series; long-memory processes; pattern recognition; inverse problems; model selection; mixed model; reliability and SPC; method comparison studies; robust statistics; asymptotics; survey estimation; Gini index; order and circular statistics.

Invited sessions on Probability included sessions on modeling; queuing networks; optimal pricing and capacity sizing in queuing systems.

Following the IISA tradition for the Young Researcher Awards, three young (i.e. under 45) researchers were honored: Bhramar Mukherjee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Methods and Applications), Debashis Paul, UC Davis (Theory and Methods) and Shalabh, IIT Kanpur, India (also Theory and Methods).

The conference had three Student Paper Competition sessions. Nineteen students were selected from the first round of competition presented at these sessions. Again, following the IISA tradition for the Best Student Paper Awards, four students were selected based on the quality of their work as well as presentations. They were, in Theory and Methods, Sumanta Basu and Pratima Bagchi both from University of Michigan, and in Methods and Applications, Subhabrata Sen (Stanford University) and Raymond Wong (UC Davis). There were also three Contributed Paper Sessions where 17 students presented their papers.

At the conference banquet, Tamara Broderick, a fresh PhD from UC Berkeley, gave an outstanding dinner presentation. Nineteen students selected from the first round of student competition were also recognized at the banquet.

The complete conference program, photos, and award details can be viewed at the website: http://2014iisa.intindstat.org.