Dave Hunter, SDSS Program Chair; Zhi Yang, SDSS Conference Committee; and Donna LaLonde, ASA Director of Strategic Initiatives and Outreach

The 2020 Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) continues to innovate and will feature several new elements, as well as popular activities from last year’s conference. Registration is open for the ASA-sponsored conference most directly devoted to strengthening ties between the statistics and data science communities, which will take place June 3–6 in Pittsburgh.

This year, the conference will feature a vastly expanded career service, including (dependent upon funding) a corporate-student meetup event Thursday evening at which students and others seeking employment will be able to mingle with representatives from companies interested in people possessing their skill sets.

We have also implemented a new system of refereed contributed presentations. Modeled after the well-established systems in place at many prestigious computing conferences, this system provides an outlet for work at the interface of statistics and computing that is less cumbersome than the usual journal refereeing process.

Popular elements from the SDSS 2019 conference, such as the speed mentoring event and organized lunch meetups, will again be part of the program. There will also be time in the evenings for those attending to catch up with old friends and colleagues or chat with new ones while enjoying all downtown Pittsburgh has to offer. Finally, we will once again offer a full slate of for-fee workshops during the day on June 3 before the official start of the conference that evening with the opening mixer.

New to the program this year will be additional for-fee lunch with conversation events scheduled at the close of the conference on June 6.

The scientific program will again be organized into “tracks”: machine learning; education; software and data science technologies; computational statistics; practice and applications; and data visualization. Roughly speaking, the scientific program features one session per track, running concurrently throughout the conference. Interspersed with the concurrent sessions will be e-poster sessions, which cut across all the tracks and often feature refreshments and the chance to chat informally. Keynote addresses by leaders in the data science community complete the program offerings.

Each of our three keynote speakers has a connection to Pittsburgh. We’ll leave it to readers to try to discover what these connections are but, in at least one case, it’s obvious:

Rebecca Nugent is the newly named Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor in Statistics & Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a national leader in data science education.

Jeannette Wing is the director of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, where she has been a professor of computer science since 2017, after several years as corporate vice president of Microsoft Research.

And Rob Tibshirani, from Stanford University, is among the most influential developers of statistical methodology in the world, as well as the co-author of multiple highly influential books on data science, including Elements of Statistical Learning, An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R, and Statistical Learning with Sparsity.

Beyond the scientific program, Pittsburgh is a great place to visit! Within easy walking distance of the Westin Conference Center are multiple restaurants, museums, theaters, and shopping opportunities in the trendy Strip District. The scenic Pittsburgh waterfront boasts the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, known as “The Point,” and PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who will be in town for a home game each of the days of SDSS. (Thanks to Major League Baseball for arranging this for us!)

Register now and visit Pittsburgh this June to join the diverse gathering of data experts SDSS has become.