JSM 2020: Like No Other

David Banks, JSM 2020 Program Chair

I don’t know about the rest of you, but, psychologically, I’m near the middle of a barycentric coordinate system whose vertices are the following:

• What wonderful people we work with!
• I need a glass of wine.
• Mischief managed.

My first JSM was in 1981, and I’ve been to every JSM since 1984. None of them have been anything like the 2020 meeting. But, thanks to a whole lot of people whom I shall soon thank, I think we managed to pull it off. There were glitches and hiccups (e.g., Roger Koenker’s Medallion Lecture had a delayed start and the first five minutes of the Cliff Spiegelman Memorial Session had to be re-recorded). On the other hand, people really enjoyed the chat feature and, although I know Google’s BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers) could completely overcome the occasional solecisms and profanity in the real-time captioning system, I think people found it so amusing that we should keep it unchanged if we are still virtual next year.

The new capabilities were really nice. Being able to go back to view the talks I missed was great. And Sir David Cox spoke at and C. R. Rao joined in on the session celebrating his centenary—that would have been difficult to manage with an in-person meeting. I liked the lower costs, the ability to sleep in my own bed, and the shorter hours.

I was amazed by the quality of the program. We had dual-speaker introductory overview lectures by (in order of appearance) Lizhen Lin (Scalable Bayes and MCMC) and Dave Blei (Scaling and Generalizing Approximate Bayesian Inference); Cynthia Rudin (Interpretable Machine Learning) and Mike Jordan (Data Science and Decisions: Dynamical, Statistical, and Economic Perspectives); Beka Steorts (Entity Resolution with Application to Data in the Wild) and Megan Price (How Multiple Systems Estimation Helps Count Undocumented Victims of Conflict Violence); Giles Hooker (Introduction to Dynamical Systems Part 1) and Sy-Miin Chow (Introduction to Dynamical Systems Part 2); and Chris Bilder and Chris McMahan (both titled Just Group It), who discussed group testing in the context of COVID-19.

There were three late-breaking sessions. One on COVID-19 (of course), one on a human trafficking report from the National Academies, and one on another National Academies report about data science postsecondary education. The public lecture was an amazing father-daughter team, Nick and Britta Jewell, who discussed the epidemiology and impact of the pandemic. Amy Herring moderated a fascinating discussion of the historical entwinement of statistics and eugenics, the understanding and perception of which has changed enormously over the last 150 years.

The IMS arranged three tremendous Medallion lectures by Susan Holmes, Roger Koenker, and Paul Rosenbaum. Amita Manatunga gave the COPSS Elizabeth Scott Lecture, and Kathryn Roeder gave the COPSS Distinguished Achievement Lecture. And I thought the rest of the scientific program was strong across the board.

I hope some of my contemporaries will remember Marisa Tomei’s line from My Cousin Vinny, when her fiancé has been slow to acknowledge her help: “You know, this could be a sign of things to come. You win all your cases, but with somebody else’s help, right? You win case after case, and then, afterwards, you have to go up to somebody and you have to say, ‘Thank you.’ Oh my God, what a f***ing nightmare!”

In my case, it is no nightmare. I owe heartfelt expressions of gratitude! First, I thank all the ASA members who participated in JSM 2020 and made it a success—I am so glad to be part of this professional family. And I am even more grateful to the members of the 2020 Program Committee, who did their jobs twice this year—once at the end of February for an in-person meeting and then again a few weeks later for a virtual event. I also thank Rich Levine (the 2019 program chair); Julie Beckley and Michelle Dunn, the associate program chairs; and Maggie Niu, the associate program chair for posters. Their leadership was essential to our success. But it is no secret who the real heroes of every JSM are—the ASA staff. Kathleen Wert, Naomi Friedman, Christina Link, and Kristin Mohebbi are the ones who delivered the conference for us, triumphing over all the impediments of the pandemic and maintaining a unique combination of utter professionalism and snarky gallows humor.