BFF community meets in Salzburg for 10th Anniversary Conference

Arne Bathke and Minge Xie report: Directly following the 2026 IMS Annual Meeting in Salzburg’s Congress House, the 10th edition of the BFF conference series on Bayesian, Fiducial, and Frequentist Statistics took place at the University of Salzburg on 10 and 11 July 2026 (https://bffconference.github.io/bff-salzburg-2026/index.html). Chaired by Arne Bathke (Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces, Salzburg) and Minge Xie (Department of Statistics, Rutgers), the conference brought together around 70 established statisticians, as well as aspiring young researchers from around the world.

BFF10 started on Thursday evening with a pre-conference aperitif overlooking Salzburg’s old town from Mönchsberg Hill, setting the stage for two days of lively academic exchange. The scientific program began on Friday morning and featured nine invited sessions, as well as two keynote lectures by Peter Grünwald and Richard Samworth. Peter Grünwald from CWI and Leiden University opened the conference with “E-Values and BFF: they should be BFF!”, and Richard Samworth from the University of Cambridge (and new IMS President) gave the second keynote on “Outrigger Local Polynomial Regression”.

In his insightful and entertaining presentation, “Celebrating the 10th BFF Conference”, Xiao-Li Meng from Harvard University also highlighted the historical development and the ongoing relevance of the BFF series. The dinner speech by Peter Bühlmann emphasized that statisticians should not just “play in the backyard” (based on Tukey’s famous quote); rather, he argued, it would be highly appropriate for statisticians to be actively visible in the front yard.

Several young researchers were not only presenting their research at BFF10, but also competing for a poster award. The BFF10 poster jury, consisting of Thorsten Dickhaus (Bremen), Robin Gong (Rutgers), and Solomon Harrar (Kentucky), had the very difficult task of selecting three winners from among the excellent entries. Ultimately, the three outstanding contributions by Kai Schärer (Salzburg), Adriana Gonzalez Sanchez (Cincinnati), and Dennis Christensen (Oslo) were each awarded a BFF10 poster prize that came with a generous cash award thanks to our gold sponsor NGL (nxgl.ai). Additionally, every poster presenter could pick a statistics book, kindly donated by Springer and Cambridge University Press.

The organizers are grateful to all speakers, participants, and supporters who contributed to the 10th anniversary BFF meeting in Salzburg, and we hope that Bayesian, Fiducial, and Frequentist statisticians will remain BFFs for many more years to come. BFF11 will be hosted by the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.