Nancy Reid, University Professor of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto

The CANSSI staff

The Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI), was established in 2012 by the Statistical Society of Canada.

The purpose of CANSSI is to advance research in the statistical sciences in Canada by attracting new researchers to the field, increasing the points of contact among researchers nationally and internationally, and developing scientific collaboration with other disciplines and organizations.

CANSSI is a virtual institute, building research capacity across the country and relying on the following three mathematical sciences institutes in Canada for infrastructure and logistical support:

• Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences
• Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS)
• Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM)

Institutional members, as well as mathematics and statistics departments across the country, provide additional funding and support.

Scientific Activities

The over-riding scientific goals of CANSSI are to develop and encourage scientific innovation through collaboration between statistical scientists and researchers in other disciplines, to foster research excellence by increasing international points of contact, and to help train the next generation of statistical scientists. We do this through three main programs: collaborative research teams, workshops and conferences, and postdoctoral fellowships. The currently funded collaborative research team projects include the following:

• Advancements to State-Space Models for Fisheries Science
• Copula Dependence Modeling: Theory and Applications
• Statistical Modeling of the World: Computer and Physical Models in Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
• Evolved Marked Point Processes with Applications to Wildland Fire Regimes
• Inférence Statistique dans les Enquêtes Complexes avec des Données Manquantes
• Modern Spectrum Methods in Time Series Analysis: Applications in Physical Science, Environmental Science, and Computer Modeling

CANSSI also funds two postdoctoral fellowships, joint initiatives with SAMSI, and provides partial funding for several workshops each year. Most recently, CANSSI supported the International Symposium in Statistics, a workshop on advancing innovation and scholarship in statistics education at Western University, the Canadian Human and Statistical Genetics Meeting, and a conference on statistical and computational analytics for Big Data.

Governance and Management

CANSSI has a board of directors, chaired by Richard Smith of The University of North Carolina, and an international scientific advisory committee. Visit CANSSI’s website to view the directorate.

International Ties

Scientifically, the future of statistical sciences seems bright—undergraduate enrollment is skyrocketing and data science and Big Data seem to have alerted both students and researchers to the many opportunities for statistical sciences to grow beyond its traditional borders. This involves developing new training models for students, forging new collaborations—especially with computer science—and positioning statistical scientists in leadership roles in these efforts. At the same time, it is important to continue emphasizing the relevance of traditional aspects of statistical science in the Big Data world.

These challenges are, of course, global challenges and being faced by departments, schools, universities, institutes, centers, and research grants agencies. CANSSI will be working hard in the coming months to build and strengthen international ties through formal and informal agreements, student exchanges, and reciprocal advertising.

To discuss how we might collaborate with your unit or for further information, contact Nancy Reid at reid@utstat.utoronto.ca.