ICSDS 2024 in Nice, France is Yet Another Success
ICSDS 2025 will be in Seville, Spain. Join Us!
Regina Liu and Annie Qu, the co-organizers of ICSDS 2024, write:
We are delighted to report that the third ICSDS (International Conference on Statistics and Data Science), held December 16–19, 2024, in Nice, France (https://www.ims-icsds2024.org), was another huge success. It followed similarly successful ICSDS meetings in Florence in 2022, and in Lisbon in 2023!
Scientific Program: There were more than 620 participants from 40+ countries, ranging from students to junior, mid-career and senior researchers and practitioners, affiliated with industry, government, and academia, and covering broad areas of statistics and data science. The scientific program featured four plenary sessions, 68 invited sessions, seven contributed sessions, two student travel award sessions, and a poster session with 48 contributed posters.
Despite the alluring touristic attractions in Nice and the stretch of “Nice” weather, conference attendance was strong, often with jam-packed lecture rooms. The sessions topics were diverse, covering a broad spectrum, including causal inference, data privacy, AI, new machine learning methods and computing tools, medicine and genetics, high-dimensional data visualization and graphics, network data, image and text data, electronic health records data, health policies and environmental statistics, etc. We have received numerous positive comments and compliments on specific talks or the overall quality of the conference program, both during and after the meeting.
The plenary sessions featured the following outstanding speakers:
Rina Foygel Barber (University of Chicago) on “Algorithmic Stability for Regression and Classification”
Peter Bühlmann (ETH Zürich) on “Perturbation Data Science”
Cynthia Dwork (Harvard University) on “Outcome Indistinguishability and its Diverse Applications”
Martin Wainwright (MIT) on “Challenges with Covariate Shift: From Prediction to Causal Inference”
All these plenary sessions were well attended, leaving the huge auditorium with standing room only! In addition to presenting numerous important advances in statistics and data science, these plenary 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 discussion, both during and outside the sessions.
The abstracts of the plenary sessions can be found on the meeting website at https://www.ims-icsds2024.org/plenary-speakers.
The number of submissions to the student travel awards competition doubled this year. The ICSDS decided to increase the total number of student travel awards to 16, each worth USD800. The awardees selected are diverse in their paper topics, genders, and countries of study. Congratulations to the awardees! Additionally, the ICSDS also provided eight junior researchers with travel support.
Acknowledgment #1: 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 beautiful Palais de la Méditerranée in the Hyatt Regency Nice hotel, featuring delectable French-Mediterranean cuisine with wine and Taittinger Champagne. The Palais is located on the Promenade des Anglais in the heart of Nice. The conference reception was held, concurrent with the poster session, at the sumptuous historic landmark Grand Château on the campus of Université Côte d’Azur in Nice. In addition to viewing the posters, networking with fellow participants and tasting the hors d’œuvres, many participants also enjoyed the outdoor setting around the Chateau and the stunning panoramic views of the campus and its surrounding hills.
Acknowledgment #2: We are gratified to have received enthusiastic feedback from many participants; some even told us that this was the best conference ever for them. Several even offered to contribute special funds to the IMS for future ICSDS. We thank all the participants for their participation, support and contributions to this conference.
Needless to say, an international conference of this scale, with its wide-ranging subjects and breadth of participation 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 (https://www.ims-icsds2024.org/committee) for helping to establish the rich program, the Local Organizing Committee from Laboratoire J.A. Dieudonné, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France (Elena Di Bernardino [Co-chair], Damien Garreau, Yassine Laguel, Thomas Laloe [Co-chair], Patricia Reynaud-Bouret, Mira (Radomyra) Shevchenko, Samuel Vaiter, and Vincent Vandewalle). Those committee members and their student volunteers did a great job taking care of all the on-site organizational chores, all with remarkable efficiency and patience..
Our thanks also go to 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 tireless dedication to the nonstop inquiries and requests from the participants and the conference organizing team. Finally, our thanks should go to Min Xu for his invaluable contributions behind the scenes, from managing the conference website, overseeing IT support in the conference, to setting up the program and readying all slides. His great efforts helped make the conference program a reality for us all to enjoy.
We look forward to upholding the high standard and broad coverage of the program, and to further successes of future ICSDS meetings.
Speaking of which…
The fourth ICSDS will be in Seville, Spain, from December 15–18, 2025. Hope to see you there!