Armeen Taeb, Eardi Lila, and Alberto Torrejón report on the inaugural International New Researchers Conference, which took place in Seville in December, immediately before the ICSDS conference:

For the first time ever, the IMS New Researchers Group (https://www.imsnrg.com) has hosted a New Researchers Conference outside North America! The first International IMS New Researchers Conference (INRC) convened at the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Seville (IMUS), in Seville, Spain, from December 11–12, 2025: see https://imus.us.es/congresos/1INRC/. The conference was attended by 50 emerging researchers, mostly from Europe, together with five senior speakers and panelists.

The conference kicked off on the Thursday with an introduction by the IMUS director, Maria Angeles Japon (see photo).

Maria Angeles Japon [center], Director of the host venue, the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Seville, introduced the International New Researchers Conference

This was followed by a plenary talk by the IMS president-elect, Richard Samworth (see photo). Richard’s technical part of the talk was about deep learning with missing data; this was followed by some advice for new researchers.

IMS President-Elect Richard Samworth talked on deep learning with missing data

The day was further enhanced by engaging four-minute flash talks by junior attendees.

Next, we had talks by Małgorzata Bogdan on analyzing the theoretical properties of the Sorted L₁ Penalized Estimation, and by Víctor Blanco on optimization in machine learning. We had our first of two panel sessions also that day, led by Mathias Drton, Richard Samworth, Małgorzata Bogdan, and Víctor Blanco. The panelists gave insightful tips on publishing, funding, and productive research collaborations. The evening concluded with a banquet dinner, near Seville’s Plaza De España, with a fun statistics trivia quiz hosted by Armeen and Eardi (see photo).

The banquet included a fun statistics trivia quiz

On the second day, we had talks by Mathias Drton on causal modeling of stationary processes, and by Victor Panaretos on kernel embeddings and separation of measures. We also had our second panel session on academic life, including mentoring, teaching, and service. This panel (pictured) included all our senior attendees.

Panelists discussing aspects of academic life, including mentoring, teaching and service

Finally, for the first time, we held a networking session where junior researchers were divided into six groups based on their research interests, with the goal of developing interesting questions to collaborate on. After about an hour of discussion, they presented their research ideas to the conference attendees.

This INRC meeting was sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Thanks, IMS!

The second International New Researchers Conference will follow the IMS-APRM in Hong Kong in June. More soon!

IMS-NRG Plans:

• New researchers panel session and mixer at CLAPEM (Latin American congress of probability and mathematical statistics) in Uruguay.
• International New Researchers Conference right after IMS-APRM in Hong Kong in June.
• Mixer at IMS Annual Meeting in Salzburg, hosted with Bernoulli Society.

More information soon: check imsnrg.com.

Pictured here are the International New Researchers, along with conference organizers and senior speakers

Organizers and invited lecturers [l–r]: Mathias Drton, Richard Samworth, Armeen Taeb, Alberto Torrejón, Eardi Lila, Małgorzata Bogdan and Victor Panaretos