Michael Baron (American University) and Yaakov Malinovsky (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), the Co-Chairs of IWSM-2026, report:

The 9^th International Workshop in Sequential Methodologies (IWSM-2026: https://www.american.edu/cas/iwsm2026/) was held on June 1–4, 2026, at American University in Washington, DC, USA. Since its inception in 2007, IWSM has served as a premier international forum for research in sequential analysis and related areas. The 2026 meeting attracted a record 170 participants from 14 countries and 31 US states, and featured 162 presentations, making it the largest workshop in the series to date. Reflecting the continuing evolution of the field, the scientific program highlighted a broad range of topics, from foundations such as optimal stopping, sequential testing, estimation, and change-point detection, to emerging applications in machine learning, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and clinical trials.

The workshop featured four plenary lectures by Peihua Qiu, Alexander Tartakovsky, Dong-Yun Kim, and Jay Bartroff, who presented recent advances in disease surveillance, sequential multihypothesis testing, adaptive clinical trials, and confidence interval construction. Forty-eight invited and contributed sessions explored developments in reinforcement learning, high-dimensional inference, sequential decision-making, and a wide range of applications in medicine, genetics, signal processing, quality control, and security. Special sessions honored the scientific legacies of Michael Woodroofe and Tze Leung Lai, while a conversation with Nitis Mukhopadhyay provided participants with personal insights into his distinguished career and reflections on the modern development of sequential analysis. The workshop also hosted the Abraham Wald Award ceremony, recognizing outstanding papers published in Sequential Analysis during 2024–2025.

A panel discussion on teaching sequential methods at the undergraduate level highlighted growing interest in introducing the subject earlier in the statistics curriculum, motivated by increasing demand for real-time decision-making and efficient data collection methods.

Participants also learned that the 10^th IWSM will be hosted by New York University on June 5–9, 2028, continuing the workshop series’ tradition of fostering collaboration and innovation in sequential methodologies across theory, methodology, and applications. For inquiries and session proposals, please contact Professor Yajun Mei, the chair of the IWSM-2028 Organizing Committee, at yajun.mei@nyu.edu.

The 9^th IWSM was sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the National Science Foundation, the American Statistical Association, the Washington Statistical Society, the Caucus of Women in Statistics and Data Science, Springer, CRC Press, and American University. Co-sponsorship of IMS and NSF allowed early-career researchers to apply for travel support, contributing to strong participation by the next generation of scholars.

IWSM 2026 group photo