Andrej Srakar chaired the Local Organizing Committee for the 23rd European Young Statisticians Meeting, which was held online in September 2023. He writes:

The 23rd European Young Statisticians Meeting was held during September 11-15, 2023 virtually in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The European Young Statisticians Meetings (EYSM) is a series of conferences that is organised by and for young European statisticians, and are held every two years under the auspices of the European Regional Committee (ERC) of the Bernoulli Society. The last conference was hosted for the first time in Slovenia, locally organized by the Statistical Society of Slovenia and with support by Statistical Office of Republic of Slovenia (SORS).

Due to delays in the early organization stages there were 25 European countries participating at the 23nd EYSM. As is customary for EYSM, there were no parallel sessions, and 47 invited young scientists gave 20‑minute lectures. These lectures were divided into 13 sessions (two or three per day). The topics presented included, but were not limited to: Applied statistics in economics, finance, biology, etc.; Applied stochastic models; Bayesian statistics and computation; Causal inference; Central limit theorem and asymptotics; Dependent data; Design of experiments; Directional data analysis; Distributional topics; Econometrics; Functional data analysis; High-dimensional statistics; Nonparametric statistics; Random matrix theory; Robust statistics; Schramm–Loewner evolution; Spatial data; Statistical learning; Stochastic differential equations; Stochastic processes.

Moreover, six leading scientists from mathematical statistics and probability gave 60‑minute keynote lectures. Aad van der Vaart (Delft University of Technology) gave an initial keynote on Nonparametric Bayesian uncertainty quantification: a review and some open problems. Mihael Perman (University of Ljubljana and University of Primorska) lectured on Kolmogorov’s statistic and point processes. Daniela Witten (University of Washington) lectured on Data thinning and its applications. Vladimir Batagelj (University of Ljubljana) lectured on Analysis of bibliographic networks. Nina Holden (New York University) lectured on Random curves and surfaces. Finally for the last conference plenary talk, Davy Paindaveine (Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Editor of the Bernoulli journal) provided a keynote on Inference in principal component analysis under weak identifiability.

In their follow-up responses, participants remarked on the high quality of the science and the stimulating discussions they encountered. As present situation of statistics and probability is faced with some announced changes in science and society, such as the development of the artificial intelligence with focus on methodologies of machine learning and data science, and present reevaluations of scientific work taking place in the framework of CoARA and DORA agreements with more focus on open science and science communication, we tried to provide slightly more focus on this, with posting short impressions on social media profiles with positive responses from those who followed the event. Also, slightly more attention was given to talks in probability as compared to some earlier EYSMs with good response among participants.

More information about the conference, such as the scientific program, the presentations, the book of abstracts, and the conference proceedings can be found at the conference website https://sites.google.com/view/eysm2023. Recorded presentations from the event are accessible at the special YouTube channel; this was the first time recordings from EYSMs are accessible also after the event.

The next (24th) EYSM will take place in Turin, Italy, in 2025: see https://sites.google.com/view/eysmtorino2025/home. Participation in EYSM is by invitation only: see the remarks at https://www.bernoullisociety.org/organization/erc/eysm.