Byeong U. Park, Chair of the Local APRM Organizing Committee, and Feifang Hu and Runze Li, co-chairs of the APRM Scientific Program Committee

Peter Bickel gives the statistics plenary lecture.

The first IMS Asia Pacific Rim Meeting (IMS-APRM) took place at Seoul National University (SNU) in Seoul, South Korea, June 28–July 1. The new meeting series provides a forum for researchers in Asia and the Pacific Rim to communicate and collaborate and promotes communication and collaboration between area researchers and those from other parts of the world.

Masatoshi Fukushima gives the probability plenary lecture.

The program covered a range of topics in statistics and probability, highlighting recent developments and a variety of modern research topics and applications. Plenary lectures were given by Peter Bickel (statistics) and Masatoshi Fukushima (probability). There were 17 distinguished lecture sessions, 44 invited sessions, 16 topic-contributed sessions, 13 contributed sessions, and one large poster session. Distinguished lecturers included Tony Cai, Louis Chen, Jianqing Fan, Peter Hall, Xuming He, Sangyeol Lee, Xihong Lin, Zhengyan Lin, Jun Liu, J. S. Marron, Rahul Mukerjee, Sastry G. Pantula, John Robinson, Xiaotong Shen, John Jen Tai, Katsuto Tanaka, and Mark van der Laan.

ASA President-elect Sastry Pantula, his daughter (to his left), and Byeong U. Park discuss statistics after the conference dinner.

Despite cancellations due to the flu pandemic and funding cuts, more than 700 people attended the 386 presentations. The meeting opened with the poster session, which was followed by a welcome reception held in the University Cultural Center. The second day began with opening remarks by Byeong U. Park, chair of the local organizing committee; Shin Bok Kim, vice president of SNU; Jongwoo Jeon, president of the Korean Statistical Society (KSS); Fan, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) past-president; Pantula, president-elect of the American Statistical Association; Runze Li, co-chair of the scientific program committee; and Bickel. The two plenary lectures ran in parallel after the opening remarks. Bickel spoke about approaches to taking advantage of sparsity in large p and small n problems, while Fukushima gave a review of stochastic calculus in Markov processes.

Jianqing Fan, past-president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and Na Ri, 2008 Miss Korea and a junior majoring in statistics at Yonsei University, enjoy the conference dinner.

A half-day excursion was made throughout Seoul on the third day of the conference. About 300 people attended a banquet and cultural program at Hotel Lottea. The banquet was presided over by Na Ri, winner of the 2008 Miss Korea Pageant and a third-year statistics student.

IMS-APRM was organized by KSS and co-sponsored by the IMS, International Chinese Statistical Association, International Indian Statistical Association, and Japan Statistical Society. The local organizing committee consisted of 15 members and was chaired by Park. The Scientific Program Committee was co-chaired by Feifang Hu and Li.

Click here to view conference photos. The next IMS-APRM will be held in Japan in 2011.