JSM Chair Prerogatives

Dave Judkins, JSM 2011 Program Chair

It has been an exciting year preparing for the Joint Statistical Meetings that will take place in Miami Beach from July 30 to August 4. I have been ably assisted not just by the elected section and society chairs, but also by friends who agreed to work as General Methodology chairs and the poster chair. Andrew Gelman of Columbia University and Brian Wiens of Alcon Labs are the General Methodology chairs. Benmei Liu of the National Cancer Institute is the poster chair.

Andrew arranged all the introductory overview lectures for 2011, while Brian arranged the late-breaking sessions and Benmei invited posters and organized all the posters. In addition, Brian, Andrew, and I all organized General Methodology sessions that match our interests. My personal favorite, of course, is a session I organized about value-added assessments of teachers. We honor Deming each year. What would he have had to say in this area where presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are in substantial agreement?

These sessions are open to all registered attendees. So, reserve your flights, pack your bags, and join us at JSM in Miami Beach.

Introductory overview lectures. Political arguments and political representation often rely on statistics, whether it’s counting votes, measuring public opinion, or assessing the effects of policies. Sunday afternoon, Andrew will discuss how models of political behavior can be improved by moving toward a more data-based perspective.

Evidence-based medicine has the potential to transform health care, to focus resources on what works and what works best for individual people. Monday morning, Chris Schmid will discuss some of the statistical tools that can make this happen.

Data visualization lives at the intersection of science, graphic design, and online journalism. Tuesday morning, Dianne Cook will take us from the fundamentals of information display to the future of dynamic graphics.

Statistics is central to understanding gene mapping and gene expression. Wednesday morning, Cavan Reilly will talk about the technical challenges involved in moving from data to genes to learning about genetic variation relating to disease.

Posters. More than 350 posters (including invited, topic-contributed, and contributed) will be presented at JSM 2011. They will spread across five sessions from August 1 at 10:30 a.m. to August 3 at 12:20 p.m. One Data Expo competition and one Statistical Significance competition will take place for pre-entered posters. August 1 at 10:30, nine select invited posters will be presented.

Late-breaking sessions. There will be two late-breaking sessions for JSM 2011. Late-breaking sessions are for timely topics that are of interest to the statistics community, especially for topics that could not have been developed into sessions when the other invited session proposals were submitted in September 2010.

The first late-breaking session will take place August 1 at 10:30 a.m. This session will describe the Heritage Health Prize, a competition with a $3.5 million award for the best prediction of hospital admission based on historical claims data. The competition opened April 4 and the entry deadline is April 4, 2013. The session will introduce the competition, describe the objectives of the competition, and discuss modern statistical approaches that may be useful for modeling the available data.

The second late-breaking session will take place on August 3 at 8:30 a.m. This session will discuss a recent United States Supreme Court decision to use the lack of statistical significance to justify nondisclosure of data by a publicly traded company when those data are nonpublic and potentially material. The legal and statistical rationale and business impact will make this session of interest to statisticians from many specialties.

Visit the online program for updated times and locations.