Past-President Peter Bühlmann is pleased to introduce some new Friends:

Statistics and Data Science are of crucial importance in very many areas of society, with people working in academia, industry or government. To strengthen scientific exchange across fields, IMS has created a new membership category named Industry Friends of IMS (IFoIMS).

An IFoIMS member is strongly encouraged to participate in the intellectual and scientific content of IMS activities. These could include organizing invited sessions or panel discussions at IMS meetings, for example at the International Conference on Statistics and Data Science (ICSDS) or the New Researchers Conference (NRC). We aim to have IFoIMS from the widest possible spectrum of different industry sectors: the only requirement is that an IFoIMS must conduct research or development related to data science, statistics, probability, or stochastic modeling.

I am truly excited to have IFoIMS as an additional facet of IMS to enrich the exchange of cutting-edge new research and development in an industrial context. There are plenty of challenging new problems in data science, often related to massive datasets. Strengthening collaborative efforts between academia and industry will be highly beneficial for scientists working at the intersection of theory and practice in data science. IFoIMS is an additional component that makes IMS more multi-faceted [see Peter’s Presidential Address article in the September 2023 IMS Bulletin issue], and thus brings people together with different expertise and from various working environments.

You can read more about IFoIMS at https://imstat.org/industry-friends-of-ims-ifoims/

Current Industry Friends of IMS, who were involved in the initial creation of IFoIMS, are:

• Citadel Securities (https://www.citadelsecurities.com/)

• Eli Lilly and Company (https://www.lilly.com/)

Obviously, we aim to have many more!

If you have ideas or suggestions, or if you know of other good matches for an IFoIMS with a suitable contact person in the company, please write to me, as the contact person of the IMS working group to develop IFoIMS, via e-mail to buhlmann@stat.math.ethz.ch.