The North Carolina State University (NCSU) Department of Statistics hosted the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Conference from April 21–24. The conference, titled “Probability, Statistics, and Data Analysis,” attracted close to 300 participants that included both well-established and emerging young statisticians from Germany, France, South Africa, Canada, Thailand, Singapore, and India.
Plenary talks were given by 2009 ASA President Sally Morton, Michael Jordan of the University of California at Berkeley, and S. R. S. Varadhan of New York University. ASA President-elect Robert Rodriguez, 2010 ASA President Sastry Pantula, and ASA Executive Director Ron Wasserstein also were present. Finally, John Sall of SAS delivered a speech about the historical successes of SAS Institute, Research Triangle Park, and NCSU and talked about the future of analytics.
IISA honored Pranab K. Sen of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an IISA Lifetime Achievement Award. Past winners include J. K. Ghosh, S. R. S. Varadhan, and C. R. Rao. Rao also was honored for his many accomplishments, including the recent Guy Medal in Gold, awarded by the Royal Statistical Society. The IISA Service Award was given to S. R. Jammalamadaka of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
IISA honors young statisticians through young researcher awards (for researchers under 45) and student paper competitions. The young researcher award for theory and methods was given to Moulinath Banerjee of the University of Michigan; Pulak Ghosh of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, received the award for applications. Student paper award winners include Emilio Seijo of Columbia University and Subhadeep Mukhopadhyay of Texas A&M. Student poster awards were given to Xianyang Zhang of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Sayantan Banerjee of NCSU.
Soumen Lahiri of Texas A&M University chaired the scientific program committee that put together the technical sessions and panels covering the frontiers of various research areas in statistical, mathematical, and computational sciences. Sujit Ghosh and Subhashis Ghoshal, both of NCSU, co-chaired the local organizing committee.
The next IISA conference will be held in Pune, India, from January 2–5, 2013, and will be hosted by the department of statistics at the University of Pune. View the IISA NCSU conference program, abstracts, and pictures.
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