Andrej Srakar, Institute for Economic Research, Ljubljana, Slovenia, is coordinator of the YoungStatS project, part of the Young Statisticians Europe initiative. He writes:
The Young Statisticians Europe (YSE) initiative was founded in Paris in 2018, at a three-day international workshop that was organized by three young French scholars (https://www.sfds.asso.fr/en/events/629-european_workshop/). Since YSE’s start in Paris, several young sections of national statistical societies across Europe, members of the Federation of European National Statistical Societies (FENStatS), have been the most active, in particular French, Italian, Romanian, Irish, Belgian and Slovenian. Several internationally very active young scholars from Finland, Austria, Greece, Denmark, Hungary and Spain have also been present in the initiative since the beginning.
In subsequent years, YSE initiative organized two additional joint conference meetings, in 2019 in Bucharest, and in 2021 in Slovenia. We also organized several sessions at the international conferences. At our meetings we feature scholarly sessions with presentations by young scholars, as well as extended sessions for debates on the present topics of the initiative.
During the second YSE meeting in Bucharest in 2019, I presented a proposal of a blog and webinar project for younger scholars, called YoungStatS. This project was initiated during the World Statistics Day on October 28, 2020, and opened by Dr. Walter J. Radermacher, who was at the time president of FENStatS.
Screenshot from the opening of the YoungStatS project in October 2020.
YoungStatS receives support from the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). We cooperate with many young scholar initiatives around the world. YoungStatS includes a blog and the One World webinar series, including cooperation with the IMS New Researchers Group [see article on previous page] and Young Data Science Researcher Seminar Zürich. Our webinar series and blog posts have featured a high number of leading younger and more senior scholars and covered topics at the cutting edge of scholarly developments.
In recent months, Young Statisticians Europe initiative has been highly active on its formal structure and we are about to elect our leadership. Our new structure would include representatives from countries of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom. Based the fact that statistics, data science and probability are in the forefront of scientific and societal attention, we are planning ambitious projects and activities for the future, which could span to include many theoretical, applied or practical topics, oriented to young scholars and young statisticians in general.
If you are interested in our activities, please write to us and/or join our Facebook and LinkedIn groups or join our meetings, summer schools, hackathons, webinars and so on. Naturally, do continue also to follow our YoungStatS project activities—both blog posts and webinars. Our focus is not limited to Europe: anyone in the world is more than welcome to participate in the initiative.
You can find out more about YSE at the following links:
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/young-statisticians-europe/about/
• https://www.facebook.com/groups/youngstateurope/
…and about YoungStatS at:
• https://youngstats.github.io/about/