Bhramar Mukherjee, JSM 2013 Program Chair

Mukherjee

The Joint Statistical Meetings provide a unique opportunity for members of our profession to come together each year and share their scientific ideas. This year’s JSM (August 3–8, Montréal) is special, with the theme being “Celebrating the International Year of Statistics.” Members of the JSM program committee have put together an outstanding program consisting of 183 invited, 196 topic-contributed, and 230 contributed sessions. This year’s program highlights the power and impact of statistics on all aspects of science and society on a global scale.

Celebrated statistician Nate Silver, the founder of the award-winning FiveThirtyEight.com political website, will be the President’s Invited Address speaker on August 5. The COPSS Fisher Lecture will be given by Peter Bickel on August 7.

You will be sure to find many fun and interesting activities at JSM, no matter what your interests are or whether your home is in industry, government, or academia. I encourage and invite the worldwide statistics community to participate fully in the meeting, not only by attending talks, but also by visiting the poster presentations and joining Continuing Education courses, roundtable luncheons, and mixers. As the JSM 2013 program chair, I would like to draw your attention to a few new initiatives this year.

SPEED Sessions

A pilot study of contributed sessions with a new and different format will be conducted for JSM 2013. A recurrent concern for many JSM attendees has been the seemingly unbounded size of the meeting. Having to choose among 46 parallel sessions has been a source of frustration for many JSM participants. In Montréal, we will test SPEED sessions, one possible approach used at many conferences to reduce the number of concurrent sessions.

Five large ASA sections (Biometrics, Statistics in Epidemiology, Statistical Learning and Data Mining, Biopharmaceutical Statistics, and Survey Methodology) agreed to collaborate on this pilot venture. A SPEED session will consist of 20 oral presentations of approximately five minutes each, with a 10-minute break after the first set of 10 talks. These short oral presentations will be followed by an electronic poster session later on the same day.

We will conduct a detailed attendee and presenter satisfaction survey for these sessions, so if you have a chance to visit the four pilot SPEED oral and poster presentation sessions, please check out this new format and let us know what you think.

August 5, 8:30 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
Analytic Challenges in Epidemiological Studies and Public Health
Sponsors: Biometrics Section, Section on Statistics in Epidemiology

August 6, 8:30 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
Methods and Applications in Biomedical Data and Clinical Trials
Sponsors: Biometrics Section, Biopharmaceutical Section

August 6, 10:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.
Methods and Applications in High-Dimensional Data
Sponsors: Section on Statistical Learning and Data Mining, Biometrics Section

August 7, 8:30 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
Statistical Challenges with Measurement, Complex Design, and Missing Data
Sponsors: Survey Research Methods Section, Biometrics Section, Section on Statistics in Epidemiology

Introductory Overview Lectures (IOLs)

Over the years, the IOLs have not only become an integral part of JSM, but also one of the most popular and sought after features. This year, we have increased the number of IOLs relative to past years. Typical IOLs with two presentations allocate 45–50 minutes of lecture followed by 5–10 minutes of Q&A for each, whereas a single-speaker IOL is a 90-minute lecture followed by discussion and Q&A. We have the following ensemble this year:

August 4, 4:00 p.m.
Celebrating the History of Statistics
Presenters: Stephen Stigler, Alan Agresti, and Xiao-Li Meng

August 5, 8:30 a.m.
Twenty Years of Gibbs Sampling/MCMC
Presenters: Alan Gelfand and Jeff Rosenthal

August 6, 2:00 p.m.
Big Data
Presenters: Bin Yu and Bill Cleveland

August 7, 2:00 p.m.
Mediation and Confounding
Presenter: Tyler VanderWeele
Discussant: Jay Kaufman

August 7, 8:30 a.m.
Next-Generation Bioinformatics and Beyond
Presenters: Rebecca Doerge and Rafa Irizzary

August 6, 8:30 a.m.
Personalized Medicine: Tailoring Treatment to the Right Patient
Presenters: Butch Tsiatis and Stephen Ruberg

August 6, 10:30 a.m.
Inference from Complex Sample Surveys: Past Controversies, Current Orthodoxies, Future Paradigms
Presenter: Rod Little
Discussant: Ray Chambers

ASA Awards, Opening Mixer, and Invited Poster Session

On Sunday evening, you’ll be able to recognize your colleagues who are receiving various ASA awards from 7:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m., right before the Opening Mixer. Founders and Fellows will be recognized on Tuesday night after the President’s Address, but all other awards will be given during the new Sunday ceremony. Also, the invited poster session will run concurrent with the Opening Mixer (which will have plenty of free food and drink to offer). These will all be electronic posters, and David Dunson from Duke University will preside over the session. Please visit the posters and join us on Sunday evening.

Apart from these changes, there are many special invited sessions and panels this year that celebrate the global eminence of our profession in diverse directions and represent cutting-edge technical advancements. Here, I mention a few:

August 5, 2:00 p.m.
Reflection of Statistical Sciences: Past, Present, and Future. Celebration of the COPSS 50th Anniversary

August 6, 2:00 p.m.
International Efforts in Statistical Capacity Building: How You Can Help

A Celebration of J. Stuart Hunter’s Contributions to Technometrics and Statistics

August 7, 10:30 a.m.
Large-Scale Inference

August 7, 2:00 p.m.
Public Lecture to Commemorate the 300th Anniversary of Ars Conjectandi—From Gambling to Global Catastrophe: Metaphors and Images for Communicating Numerical Risks

August 7, 8:30 a.m.
Recent Methodological Development in Genomic Studies of the Post-GWAS Era

Please consider adding these items to your JSM program.