Gauri S. Datta, Partha Lahiri, and David Nickerson

A conference to celebrate Malay Ghosh’s 70th birthday will take place May 29–31, 2014, at the Marriott Inn & Conference Center on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park. The conference, titled “Frontiers of Hierarchical Modeling in Observational Studies, Complex Surveys, and Big Data,” will have plenary talks from world-renowned scientists and junior researchers. It will be a showcase of the diverse areas to which Ghosh has made profound contributions.

Ghosh earned a bachelor’s and master’s in statistics from Calcutta University in 1962 and 1964, respectively, and a PhD in statistics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of P. K. Sen in 1969. He is a Fellow of both the ASA and Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has authored more than 250 refereed publications and co-authored two books. Additionally, he has given guidance to about 50 students for their PhD dissertations. He is a distinguished professor in the department of statistics at the University of Florida.

Contributors may present a paper or poster on a variety of topics, including empirical and hierarchical Bayes, hierarchical models, small area estimation, case-control studies and choice-based sampling, nonparametrics, Bayesian approaches to statistical machine learning and data mining, empirical likelihood, and sequential analysis. Send a Microsoft Word or LaTeX file of the title and abstract (max. 300 words) of your talk indicating your choice for the type of contributed session (i.e., regular contributed session, poster session plus three-minute oral presentation, or poster only) to Yan Li at yli@survey.umd.edu by February 14, 2014. Abstracts will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to a favorable review and space constraints.

The conference is jointly sponsored by the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Washington Statistical Society of the American Statistical Association, and National Agricultural Statistics Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Visit the conference website for a list of invited speakers, registration information, and details about the meeting.