Andrej Srakar is the coordinator and co-editor of the YoungStatS project of Young Statisticians Europe. He reports on their efforts at revitalizing statistics in the post-COVID period:
Young Statisticians Europe (YSE) is an initiative of a group of young professionals in statistics, econometrics and data analysis, launched during a workshop in France in October 2018 by 20 representatives from eight European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Romania and Spain). It aims to develop a network of young statisticians across Europe to facilitate the exchange of ideas and best practice, as well as better collaboration in research and teaching. The initiative has since received the support of FENStatS, and YSE has now been joined by groups from Ireland, Italy and Slovenia.
During its second meeting in Bucharest, Romania, YSE has adopted a proposal from the Young Section (MSS) of Slovenian Statistical Society to implement a major international blog, YoungStatS, inspired by the famous economics website VoxEU. The proposal has since been implemented and officially presented to the public on World Statistics Day in October 2020, with an introduction from Dr. Walter Radermacher, President of FENStatS.
The YoungStatS project consists of a blog and webinars. (The name YoungStatS alludes to the umbrella organization within which we operate, Federation of European National Statistical Societies, FENStatS). The blog posts consist of short presentations of recently published statistical literature in leading journals in statistics, probability and econometrics, written by the authors of the articles themselves. The idea refers also to two previous successful and similar initiatives of The SHARE Blog and EconomistsTalkArt.org, and the original idea of VoxEU website. As, to our knowledge there is still no similar initiative in the area of statistics in general, the blog posts should significantly contribute to recognition of recent statistical developments in the eyes of the wider public. The posts include among other contributions those from Adel Javanmard, Marco Mondelli and Andrea Montanari; P. Richard Hahn; Yulia R. Gel; Rianne de Heide; Gabriel Chandler and Wolfgang Polonik; Richard Samworth; Jonas Peters; Gérard Biau and coauthors; Mark van der Laan; Karel Hron and Peter Filzmoser; Christoph Biernacki; and the initial post from Prof. Peter J. Diggle. They are also regularly featured on the R Bloggers platform and several other platforms, with great responses so far.
The second part of the project is the One World YoungStatS webinar series, which started in February 2021 with the webinar on Recent Advances in Modelling COVID-19. The monthly webinars are exclusively oriented towards young scholars in statistics, probability and econometrics, and each time feature two, three or sometimes four leading young speakers, including a selected renowned discussant, who present their recent research work on a chosen topic. April 2021 featured a well visited One World webinar on Bayesian Nonparametrics, May 2021 a webinar on Composite-Based Structural Equation Modelling, and June 2021 a webinar on Functional Data Analysis. In the Fall 2021 we will feature webinars on Concentration Inequalities in Machine Learning (joint webinar, co-organized with the Young Researchers Committee of the Bernoulli Society—Imma Curato, Sandro Gallo and Zhenhua Lin), featuring among others Prof. Gábor Lugosi as the webinar discussant; and webinars on symbolic data analysis and likely on algebraic statistics. We are in agreement for several other upcoming webinars in Winter 2021 and in 2022.
YoungStatS project is supported by the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. We thank them greatly for their support. In future, we plan to discuss closer connections to econometric associations, such as the Econometric Society, to also present work in econometrics in a more extensive manner.
The Editorial Board of YoungStatS since its start consists of ten members. It is coordinated by Andrej Srakar (Slovenia), along with Emanuele Aliverti and Christian Capezza (Italy), Geneviève Robin and Imke Mayer (France), Michael Fop and Amirhossein Jalali (Ireland), Elena Maria Prada and Raluca Caplescu (Romania), and Fatemeh Ghaderinezhad (Belgium). We are discussing proposals of new, additional editorial members as a number of younger and internationally active scholars have expressed their willingness to contribute to the work of the project in future.
At the moment, there seem few initiatives of such scope at the international level. The project combines, firstly, the blog, which should provide an important place for presentations of recent and interesting research work in statistics, probability and econometrics (the website designer is Emanuele Aliverti) and opens many possibilities of website presentations—many not yet explored, in the one year of the project’s existence. And secondly, the One World webinars promise a place for future presentations of younger scholars, which has been noted as something of great importance by many leading scholars in statistics, probability and econometrics in recent years.
We believe the project will have a significantly positive impact on the statistics community in future years and hope to report soon with more news about its development.
For more info: https://youngstats.github.io/