Christian Léger, 2018 JSM Program Committee Chair

The 2018 Joint Statistical Meetings took place in Vancouver, in the beautiful province of British Columbia. With a view of the Vancouver Harbour and the mountains of North Vancouver, the setting of the Vancouver Convention Centre was simply spectacular, especially since the weather was fantastic all week long! The conditions were perfect for exchanging ideas, networking, learning, finding job opportunities, and making new friends.

Left: JSM participants do the Macarena at the annual dance party.
Center: ASA President Lisa LaVange speaks to JSM attendees at the President’s Address.
Right: JSM attendees mingle in the main hall of the Vancouver Convention Centre.

The meeting was a success, with many opportunities to #LeadWithStatistics—JSM’s theme this year. In attendance were 6,346 people (including 3,336 ASA members). There were 925 professional development registrants and 230 exhibitors. The program included scientific sessions of interest to statisticians working in academia, the government, and industry with topics such as clinical trials, precision medicine, high-dimensional data, big data, data science, and machine learning, as well as many topics linked to societal issues.

Thanks to the hard work of the 45 members of the program committee and the contributions of JSM participants, 619 scientific sessions and 61 roundtables were organized. A record number of presentations (more than 3,800) were featured, including 809 individual posters and 430 speed presentations. The popularity of the speed sessions continues to grow; there were 315 and 274 such presentations in JSM 2017 and 2016. These sessions feature a five-minute oral presentation with an electronic poster presented in detail later. The electronic posters allow more flexibility in the type of information conveyed than a regular printed poster.

In 2018, JSM innovated by organizing its first public lecture. Advertised to the local community in Vancouver, it attracted a large crowd on Monday night. In a lecture titled “Born on Friday the Thirteenth: The Curious World of Probabilities,” Jeff Rosenthal of the University of Toronto grabbed the attention of teachers, teenagers, parents, JSM participants, and even the audio-visual technicians in the room as he introduced them to the amazing world of statistics and probability.

The following four plenary talks were delivered at JSM:

• ASA President’s Address
  Lisa LaVange, University of North Carolina, “Choose to Lead”
• ASA President’s Invited Address
  Laura Evans, The New York Times, “Helping to Save the Business of Journalism, One Data Insight at a Time”
• Fisher Lecture
  Susan Murphy, Harvard University, “The Future: Stratified Micro-Randomized Trials with Applications in Mobile Health”
• Deming Lecture
  John L. Eltinge, US Census Bureau, “Improving the Quality and Value of Statistical Information: 14 Questions on Management”

These lectures were outstanding and thought provoking. They can also be viewed on the ASA website.

The introductory overview lectures (IOLs) offer an introduction to important topics such as the deep learning revolution, multivariate data modeling with copulas, leading data science, reproducibility, efficient workflows, teaching statistics, and the statistical and data revolution in the social sciences. The slides for many of these presentations, as well other JSM talks for which speakers agreed to have their slides posted, are available from the online program.

Two late-breaking sessions were presented in Vancouver. Following the #metoo movement that began in the fall of 2017, the spotlight has been on sexual misconduct, including in the statistics community. A panel discussion titled “Addressing Sexual Misconduct in the Statistics Community” drew much attention. Given the importance of the topic, the session was recorded.

Another late-breaking session was titled “Statistical Issues in Application of Machine Learning to High-Stakes Decisions.” Four presentations covered machine learning algorithms, which are increasingly used to inform decisions with direct and lasting human impacts, but which have been subject to much public scrutiny and debate recently regarding the fairness, accuracy, and transparency properties of their tools.

Left: JSM attendees shared why they are the future of data science and statistics on a chalkboard at the ASA booth in the EXPO.
Center (from left): Ryan Tibshirani, associate professor in the department of statistics and the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon; Dave Zhao, assistant professor in the department of statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Rob Tibshirani, professor of statistics and biomedical data science at Stanford. Not pictured are Andrew Correia, senior data scientist at TripAdvisor, and Ryan Sun, postdoctoral research fellow in the department of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Right: Qiuyi Wu and Shiyang Ma play a game of giant Jenga at JSM’s Opening Mixer.

Every year, memorial sessions honor statisticians who have had a major effect on our field and recently passed away. This year, friends and colleagues of Stephen E. Fienberg, Ingram Olkin, Alastair Scott, and Charles Stein offered insight into these leaders’ achievements and personalities. A topic-contributed session was also devoted to James R. Thompson.

So many interesting scientific sessions were organized at JSM 2018, but especially noteworthy are the Medallion lectures by Anthony Davison and Ming Yuan, the Noether lectures by Jianqing Fan and Anirban Bhattacharya, and the Sirken lecture by Colm O’Muircheartaigh.

The success of JSM 2018 is the result of hard work by many people, notably the program chairs from each section or association. Their names appear on the JSM website. If you have reached this point in the article and agree with me, take a few seconds to send your representative a thank you.

While the work of the program committee members is crucial, the ASA meetings staff simplifies our lives tremendously and are the main reason JSM runs so smoothly. Incredible thanks are due to Kathleen Wert, Naomi Friedman, Amanda Conageski, and Christina Link.

Finally, the success of JSM is due to all of you in our community who organized sessions, gave presentations, led roundtables, and actively participated in the meetings.

I wish to conclude by thanking my two associate chairs—Josée Dupuis of Boston University and Ryan Tibshirani of Carnegie Mellon University—as well as the invited and contributed poster chair, Paul McNicholas of McMaster University. The four of us, all Canadians, worked as an executive committee of the program committee, and their contribution to the program was crucial. I also want to thank the members of the 2016 ASA Committee on Meetings, who selected me as program chair. For the first time, a JSM program chair was selected from an institution outside of the United States. I want to thank them for their confidence.

If you get a chance to become involved with JSM, don’t hesitate to accept; you will not regret it! I look forward to actively participating in JSM 2019 in Denver!