Institute of Mathematical Statistics | ICSDS Lisbon: another success

February 15, 2024

ICSDS 2023 took place in Lisbon, Portugal, in December 2023. Organizers Regina Liu and Annie Qu received very positive feedback, and branded it “another huge success!”
ICSDS 2024 will be in Nice, France, in December 2024. Join us!

Regina Liu and Annie Qu write:

We are delighted to report that the International Conference on Statistics and Data Science (ICSDS) held December 18–21, 2023, in Lisbon, Portugal, has more than duplicated the success of the 2022 ICSDS in Florence!

Scientific Program:

There were more than 550 participants from 40 countries, ranging from students, junior, mid-career to senior researchers and practitioners, affiliated with industry, government, and academia, and covering broad areas of statistics and data science. The scientific program had four plenary sessions, 57 invited sessions, seven contributed sessions, a student travel award session, a poster session with 57 contributed posters, and a session on “Industry Friends of IMS” initiated by the IMS to promote collaborations between academia and Industry.

Despite the alluring tourist attractions in Lisbon and the unexpected stretch of sunny weather, the conference had strong attendance, even up to the last day. This, in addition to numerous positive comments conveyed to us, clearly attested to the quality of the conference program. The session topics were diverse across a broad spectrum, including deep learning, artificial intelligence, new machine learning methods and computing tools, personalized medicine and genetics, big data visualization and graphics, network data, image and text data, electronic health records data, health policies and environmental statistics, among others.

The plenary sessions featured the following outstanding speakers:

David Donoho (Stanford University) on Data Science at the Singularity;

Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley) on Statistical Inference, Asymmetry of Information and Statistical Contract Theory;

Gábor Lugosi (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain) on Network Archaeology: Models and Some Recent Results; and

Caroline Uhler (MIT) on Causality Meets Representation Learning.

All of the plenary sessions were extremely well attended, leaving the huge auditorium with standing room only! In addition to presenting numerous important advances in statistics and data science, those talks also covered wide-ranging challenges and opportunities for statistics and data science. The talks were inspiring and thought-provoking, evidenced by the long list of questions and discussions, both during and outside the sessions.

The abstracts of the plenary sessions can be found at https://www.icsds2023.com/plenary-speakers.

Student Travel Awards:

The ICSDS presented 12 student travel awards of USD800 each. The awardees selected are diverse in their paper topics, genders, and countries of studies. We extend congratulations to: Alexis Boulin (Laboratoire Jean Alexandre Dieudonné, France); Matthieu Bulté (University of Copenhagen, Denmark); Onrina Chandra (Rutgers University, USA); Michel Groppe (University of Göttingen, Germany); Yu Gui (University of Chicago, USA); Chiara Gaia Magnani (University of Milan–Bicocca, Italy); Manuel Mueller (University of Cambridge, UK); Arpan Singh (IIT Hyderabad, India); Paul Rognon Vael (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain); Lasse Vuursteen (TU Delft; The Netherlands); Xin Xiong (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, USA); Yuming Zhang, University of Geneva, Switzerland). The award winners are pictured on page below right, along with other photos by Carlston Gray. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support from the funds of Industry Friends of IMS (IFoIMS: https://imstat.org/industry-friends-of-ims-ifoims/) for the ICSDS Student Travel Awards and Junior Researcher Travel Support.

Social Program:

More than 300 participants attended the conference banquet, held at the stunningly beautiful Casa do Alentejo, where participants got to enjoy a traditional Portuguese meal as well as a soulful Fado performance. The conference reception was held, concurrent with the poster session, on the beautiful terrace of the conference venue, with several famous historical landmarks in sight. In addition to viewing the posters, networking with fellow participants, and tasting the Portuguese hors d’œuvres (entradas), many participants also enjoyed the outdoor setting under the unusually sunny and warm weather conditions, not to mention the stunning views.

Acknowledgments:

We are gratified to have received enthusiastic feedback from many participants, several even told us that this is the best conference ever for them. We thank all the participants for their participation and contributions to this conference.

Needless to say, an international conference of this scale, with its wide coverage of subjects and size of broad participants from various disciplines across the world, would not have been possible without the collective efforts of many.

We would like to thank the program committee for helping establish the rich program, the Local Organizing Committee: Eunice Carrasquinha (Co-chair, CEAUL-FCUL), Ivette Gomes (Co-chair, CEAUL-FCUL), Tiago Marques (University of St Andrews, UK), Teresa A. Oliveira (Co-chair, CEAUL and Universidade Aberta), Soraia Pereira (CEAUL, Universidade de Lisboa), Giovani Silva (IST, CEAUL, Universidade de Lisboa), and Lisete Sousa (Universidade de Lisboa), for their tremendous efforts for this event. In particular, Ivette and Teresa, together with Min Xu (Rutgers), worked tirelessly to turn the messy and long conference program into a perfectly organized program book of 2023 ICSDS (see https://imstat.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ICSDS2023-program-book.pdf).

We also thank Elyse Gustafson (IMS Executive Director) for her help with the financial issues and related formalities on behalf of the IMS, and to Arlene Gray (Administrator, ICSDS) for her patience and dedication to the non-stop inquiries and requests from the participants and the conference organizing team. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions behind the scenes from Min Xu, from managing the conference website and negotiating IT support with the conference venue, to setting up the program and readying all slides. He efficiently met unexpected challenges—technical as well as personal—head-on. It suffices to say that Min did all the heavy lifting to help make the conference program a reality for us all to enjoy.

We hope to continue the success of the first two ICSDS, and to uphold the high standard and broad coverage of the program. We have again set up a strong and diverse program committee for the next ICSDS.

—

Regina Liu and Annie Qu, Co-organizers for ICSDS 2023

The 2024 ICSDS will be in Nice, France, from December 16–19, 2024. Details to follow at
https://sites.google.com/view/ims-icsds2024/
Hope to see you there!

Here’s a selection of photos from ICSDS 2023, courtesy of Annie Qu and Carlston Gray.