Regina Liu and Annie Qu, co-organizers of the 2025 IMS International Conference on Statistics and Data Science, report:

We are delighted to report that the 2025 ICSDS (International Conference on Statistics and Data Science), held December 15–18 in Seville, Spain, was another huge success. It followed similarly successful ICSDS meetings in Florence in 2022, Lisbon in 2023, and Nice in 2024.

Scientific Program: There were more than 710 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, 68 invited sessions, 20 contributed sessions, three student travel award sessions, and a poster session with 60 contributed posters.

Despite the alluring touristic attractions and the festive pre- Christmas celebrations in Seville, conference attendance was strong. The session topics were diverse, including deep learning, AI, causal inference, data privacy, 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, and more. Many participants expressed positive comments and compliments on specific talks or the overall quality of the conference program, during and after the meeting.

The plenary sessions featured: Bin Yu (University of California at Berkeley, USA) on “Veridical Data Science towards Trustworthy AI”; Francis Bach (Ecole Normale Supérieure, France) on “Recent advances in uncertainty quantification: anytime guarantees and multivariate predictions”; Daniela Witten (University of Washington, USA) on “Data thinning and beyond”; Richard Samworth (University of Cambridge, UK) on “Learn the Score.”

Audience for Bin Yu’s plenary session

All 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, those talks also covered wide ranging challenges and opportunities for statistics and data science. The talks are 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 at https://sites.google.com/view/ims-icsds2025/plenary-speakers.

Some of the winners of the ICSDS travel awards, with IMS President-Elect Richard Samworth

Submissions to the competition for student travel awards more than doubled this year. The ICSDS decided to increase the number of student travel awards to 21. The awardees selected are diverse in their paper topics, genders, and countries of study. Congratulations to the awardees, who are listed at: https://sites.google.com/view/ims-icsds2025/travel-awards_1. Additionally, the ICSDS provided 11 Junior Researcher Travel Support awards. We gratefully acknowledge the generous donations, particularly those from Professor Joseph Gastwirth, to the ICSDS funds, which made possible the ICSDS Student Travel Awards and Junior Researcher Travel Support.

Social Program: More than 300 participants attended the conference banquet, held at the beautiful Abades Triana restaurant, featuring refined Andalusian cuisine and a Spanish flamenco dance performance. The restaurant sits on the bank of the Guadalquivir river, facing the Torre del Oro and the stunning night views of Seville city center. The passionate and highly rhythmic Spanish flamenco [left], blending dance, song and guitar with intense emotion, was certainly the high point of the banquet! The conference reception was held, concurrent with the poster session, at the grand historic landmark Royal Tobacco Factory. In addition to viewing the posters, networking with fellow participants and tasting the Andalusian tapas, many participants also took turns to enjoy the city tours provided by ICSDS.

Poster session

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

Needless to say, an international conference of this scale, with its wide-ranging subjects and broad representation of 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://sites.google.com/view/ims-icsds2025/committee) for organizing the rich program. The local organizing committee from Universidad de Sevilla and Universidad de Granada—M. Dolores Jimenez-Gamero (Chair), Ana M. Aguilera, Emilio Carrizosa, M. Dolores Martinez Miranda, Fatima Palacios Rodríguez, Remedios Sillero Denamiel, and their student volunteers—did a fabulous job taking care of all the on-site organizational chores with remarkable efficiency and patience.

Our thanks also go to Elyse Gustafson, IMS Executive Director, for help with the financial issues and related formalities, and to Arlene Gray, ICSDS Administrator for her tireless dedication to the nonstop inquiries and requests from the participants and the conference organizing team. Finally, our thanks go to Min Xu for his invaluable contributions behind the scenes, from managing the conference website, overseeing IT support in the conference, and responding to endless requests for scheduling changes, to setting up the program and readying all the slides. His efforts helped make the conference program a reality for us all to enjoy.

We look forward to upholding the high standard and to further successes of future ICSDS meetings. Speaking of which…

The 2026 ICSDS will be in Split, Croatia, from December 15–18, 2026. Details coming soon. We hope to see you there!

Many thanks to Carlston Gray for the great photos. You can find a few more photos in the April/May 2026 IMS Bulletin…