Yasmin H. Said is the 2018 SDSS Program Chair. She holds a PhD in computational statistics. Based on her research on ecological alcohol systems, she was awarded patent 7,800,616, Policy Analysis and Action Decision Tool. She was a visiting fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge in England. She was a founding co-editor-in-chief of WIRES: Computational Statistics, a Wiley journal. She is an elected member of both the Research Society on Alcoholism and International Statistical Institute.

The ASA Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) is designed for data scientists, computer scientists, and statisticians who analyze and visualize complex data. The 2018 symposium returns to Reston, Virginia, the site of the original 1988 symposium held under the newly incorporated Interface Foundation of North America (IFNA). The SDSS series, beginning this May, is a joint collaboration of the ASA, assuming responsibility for administrative management, and the Interface Foundation, retaining responsibility for the direction and intellectual focus. 

The SDSS program offers short courses, concurrent sessions, electronic poster sessions, exhibits, and many opportunities for networking. Emery N. Brown, a well-known scholar with a medical focus on anesthesiology and neuroscience, will give the keynote address: “Uncovering the Mechanisms of General Anesthesia: Where Neuroscience Meets Statistics.”

The plenary talks will feature David Scott from Rice University, David Brillinger from the University of California at Berkeley, Jerome Friedman from Stanford University, and Adalbert Wilhelm from Jacobs University in Germany.

The invited program includes session tracks on data science, data visualization, machine learning, computational statistics, computing science, and applications and features well-known scholars such as Leland Wilkinson, Roy Welch, Wayne Oldford, Edward George, William Cleveland, David Banks, Michael Trosset, Menas Kafatos, how much does generic ativan cost Nozer Singpurwalla, Lynne Billard, Carey Priebe, Douglas Nychka, Kirk Borne, and Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. In addition, there will be a number of contributed and electronic poster sessions. In total, there will be approximately 300 presentations split nearly equally between invited and contributed talks, as well as poster sessions spanning an array of topics.

A key feature of SDSS is a collection of short courses. These short courses will focus on the latest software tools, technologies, and methodologies for data science—including the Hadoop, R, and Spark ecosystems—and give participants hands-on experience. A number of high-profile technology companies will present these short courses, as well as invited talks, including Cloudera, Databricks, Domino, H2O.ai, IBM, Microsoft, RStudio, and SAS.

There will be many opportunities for networking and social interaction with ample breaks, continental breakfasts on Thursday through Saturday, an opening mixer on Wednesday, and a symposium banquet on Thursday. Barry Nussbaum, 2017 ASA president, will be the banquet speaker, giving a light-hearted talk titled, “I Never Met a Datum I Didn’t Like.”

 The 2018 SDSS is being held in honor of Edward Wegman, the founder and a key person in IFNA, serving as treasurer for some 30 years. He was the founding chair of the statistics department at George Mason University and developed both the MS in statistical science and PhD in computational science and informatics there. He has been dissertation director for 44 doctoral students, with seven additional students in candidacy. After a 32-year career at George Mason, Wegman will retire at the end of May as professor emeritus. He earned his PhD in May 1968 from the University of Iowa. Several sessions in this first SDSS are dedicated to his contributions to the profession.