Ming-Hui Chen, 2022 Program Chair

JSM 2022 was held in person in Washington, DC, August 6–11, and was perhaps our first big in-person, post-COVID-19 meeting as a community. One invited speaker wrote to me and said, “I really enjoyed the conference and interactions with the audience.” Another wrote, “… [It] was a really excellent meeting. I thoroughly enjoyed being at an in-person JSM again!”

ASA President Kathy Ensor set the theme for JSM 2022 as “Statistics: A Foundation for Innovation.” Due to the work of the program committee, we had many paper sessions, panel sessions, lectures, and roundtables to attend, and most were closely related to Ensor’s theme. Overall, we had a strong scientific program and another successful JSM.

Plenary Talks and Lectures

JSM featured four plenary talks and four named lectures, which covered a spectrum of topics such as the foundations of statistics, importance of statistics in education, methods and open problems for observational studies, extreme conditional quantiles, multivariate quantiles, and pattern graphs for missing data. There were also talks and discussions about how to use biostatistical methods and team science in clinical practice and how to combine information from multiple data sources to assess race-ethnic health disparities.

Plenary Lectures

• ASA President’s Address and Awards, Katherine B. Ensor, “Celebrating Statistical Foundations Driving 21st-Century Innovation”
• ASA President’s Invited Address, Reginald DesRoches, “The Importance of Statistics in a Liberal Arts Education”
• Deming Lecture, David Banks, “Deming and the Industries of Today”
• COPSS Awards and Distinguished Achievement Award and Lecture, Nancy Margaret Reid, “Likelihood and Its Discontents”

Named Lectures

• COPSS Elizabeth L. Scott Lecture, Madhu Mazumdar, “Biostatistical Methods and Team Science: Generating Evidence for Optimization of Clinical Practice”
• Medallion Lectures:
  • Dylan Small, “Protocols for Observational Studies: Methods and Open Problems”
  • Huixia Wang, “Extreme Conditional Quantiles”
• Noether Lectures:
  • Yen-Chi Chen, “Nonparametric Missing Data: Pattern Graphs”
  • Marc Hallin, “From Multivariate Quantiles to Copulas and Statistical Depth, and Back”
• Monroe G. Sirken Award Lecture, Trivellore Eachambadi Raghunathan, “Combining Information from Multiple Data Sources to Assess Race-Ethnic Health Disparities”

Introductory Overview Lectures
There were also four well-attended introductory overview lectures on four distinct, diverse, and emerging topics of current interest in statistics, including computational advertising, sports analytics, the interface between randomized controlled trials and real-world studies, and statistics and networks.

• On Sunday, David Banks of Duke University discussed statistical challenges in computational advertising and Nathaniel Stevens of the University of Waterloo presented on experimental design in computational advertising.
• On Monday, Mark Glickman of Harvard University introduced the basics of measuring competitor strength and evaluating player contribution, while Jun Yan of the University of Connecticut talked about sports analytics beyond performance evaluation. Katherine Evans of the Washington Wizards and Guanyu Hu of the University of Missouri served as discussants.
• The third IOL took place Tuesday and featured Jie Chen of Overland Pharmaceuticals, who talked about the interface between randomized controlled trials and real-world studies. Weili He of AbbVie and Mark Levenson of the FDA served as discussants.
• On Wednesday, Eric Kolaczyk of Boston University (now McGill University) gave a quick survey of statistics and networks, while Purnamrita Sarkar of The University of Texas at Austin presented “Through the Lens of Graphons: An Examination of Models, Inference, and Uncertainty Quantification.”

Late-Breaking Sessions

JSM included two late-breaking sessions this year. One session, “Accelerating Transparency in National Statistics,” was organized by Michael L. Cohen of the Committee on National Statistics. This session was timely, as there is a great need to update statisticians within statistical systems on methods that can improve the process of conducting and disseminating statistical products from national surveys.

The second session was organized by Samantha Tyner of Tritura Information Governance and titled “Algorithmic Bias and Public Policy.” A panel of data scientists; attorneys; and other experts from industry, academia, and government discussed the complex web of issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence and public policy. This panel also discussed recent legislation concerning algorithmic bias and how to measure, mitigate, and prevent it.

Memorial Sessions

During every JSM, we memorialize statisticians who had a major effect on our field and recently passed away. This year, we remembered and celebrated the lives of Ken Brewer, David Cox, Marshall Joffe, Arthur Cohen, Nozer Singpurwalla, and Donald A. S. Fraser.

The success of JSM 2022 is the outcome of hard work by many people, especially the program chairs from each section or association.

My experiences as the program chair for the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science in 2005 and the program chair for JSM 2022 were rewarding. The working relationships I have developed with many of you are rich and have been long-lasting. I strongly invite you to get involved with JSM in any capacity. I look forward to seeing you in person at JSM 2023 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.