Arne Bathke writes:
Our 2026 IMS Annual Meeting took place from 6 to 9 July in beautiful Salzburg, the picturesque Austrian city known as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadé (Amadeus) Mozart and Christian Doppler, and as the setting of the “Sound of Music” story, as well as home of the renowned Salzburg Music Festival.
The 400 participants gathered at Salzburg Congress enjoyed excellent keynotes by Tilmann Gneiting (IMS Wald Lectures), Cun-Hui Zhang (Blackwell Lecture), Ian McKeague, Bodhisattva Sen, and Jelle Goeman (Medallion Award Lectures), as well as almost 300 other invited and contributed presentations. [See photos on page 4–5 of the September 2026 IMS Bulletin.]
This conference also marked the IMS presidential transition from Kavita Ramanan to Richard Samworth. In her presidential address [in a Bulletin soon], Kavita highlighted the many ways IMS can help its members, but also pointed out how IMS relies on members’ input in order to best serve the scientific community. Kavita invited responses to this short IMS member survey!
IMS 2026 was organized by Kavita Ramanan (President), program committee members Genevera Allen (Statistics) and Remco Van der Hofstad (Probability), as well as local host Arne Bathke, with engaged on-site support by several team members from IMS and from Salzburg’s Lab for Intelligent Data Analytics (IDA) and the University of Salzburg’s graduate program in Data Science. Support was received from the City of Salzburg and the Federal State of Salzburg who jointly invited participants to a concert reception (with music by W. A. Mozart and his contemporary R. Hoffstetter) on the first evening, along with welcome remarks by representatives from city and state, as well as the Dean of the Faculty of Digital and Analytical Sciences.
Highlighting Salzburg’s reputation as a city of music, the local hosts organized some musical treats for conference participants. Keynote lectures were opened by a live string quartet, consisting of musicians of the internationally acclaimed Camerata Salzburg orchestra. Many conference attendees said how much they enjoyed this part of the program, and how it helped create a highly focused atmosphere for the subsequent scientific lectures. You can listen to the set list: see below.
Musical interludes at the IMS 2026 meeting
Johann Sebastian Bach: BWV 1080 Contrapunctus 1
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart: KV 80 Rondeau
Giacomo Puccini: SC 65 Crisantemi and SC 61 Minuetto No.2
Max Reger after Johann Sebastian Bach BWV 622: Chorale Transcription “O Mensch, bewein Dein Sünde…”
Franz Schubert: D.89, 5 deutsche Tänze, Tanz No.1
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart: KV 546 Adagio und Fuge
And songs from “The Sound of Music” also featured!
Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/imstat2026
The organizers are grateful for all the very kind feedback received during and after the conference!
Upcoming IMS Annual meetings will take place in Chicago (at the JSM, 8–12 August, 2027) and Singapore (Bernoulli–IMS World Congress, 24–28 July, 2028).