Shahjahan Khan, ISOSS President
More than 300 people attended the 10th Islamic Countries Conference on Statistical Sciences (ICCS-X), held at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in New Cairo, Egypt. The conference was dedicated to the late Mir Maswood Ali, a statistician from Bangladesh and founder of the department of statistical and actuarial sciences at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
In the opening session, AUC Provost Lisa Anderson spoke about the importance of statistics, from ancient times to the modern day. ISOSS president Shahjahan Khan emphasized interaction between statisticians from developed countries and those in developing countries—especially with those of the IOC member states—for improving the quality of government statistics and statistical research and enhancing its state-of-the-art applications. Magued Osman, chair of the local organizing committee and head of IDSC, spoke about the role statistics plays in development and good governance. Ali S. Hadi, vice provost of AUC and editor of ISI Review, welcomed participants and spoke about the scientific and cultural activities of the conference.
The highlights of the conference were the four keynote speakers. Jef L. Teugels, president of the International Statistical Institute, talked about extreme value distributions with applications. He analyzed data from natural disasters with extremes coming from the 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh and Hurricane Katrina. Jim Berger covered Bayesian adjustments of multiplicity in the testing regime of a huge number of tests coming from multidisciplinary scientific studies. Edward Wegman, who testified in front of Congress twice on the scientific aspects of climate change, discussed the rapid changes in data science and the challenges of analyzing large data sets for scientific applications. Kaye Bashford, former president of the Statistical Society of Australia, discussed applications of multivariate data analysis for determining the best quality of wheat production.
A series of panel discussions related to the conference theme—Statistics for Development and Good Governance—was presented along with invited sessions. Topics discussed during the sessions included statistics education, demography and aging, small-area sampling, medical meta-analysis, statistical inference, and directional data analysis.
Click here for details about the conference and other ISOSS activities.
Leave a Reply