Two recent conferences celebrated the 90th birthday of C. R. Rao, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. The International Conference on Frontiers of Interface Between Statistics and Sciences in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, and The Advances in Statistical Science conference, which took place in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

J. L. Narayana made a passionate plea for appropriate critical thinking and statistical training for the next decade, during the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) conference that took place January 4–8 at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India.

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.

The Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics (ISAE) was established in July of 1969 with initial support from the United Nations Development Programme to meet the need for high-level training of professional statisticians in eastern and southern Africa. Here is a showcase of the programs the ISAE has used to train more than 3,000 professional statisticians, quantitative economists, actuarial scientists, and population scientists.

Japan is second only to the United States as a consumer of pharmaceutical products. This notwithstanding, statistical contributions to clinical trials and clinical development were not well-recognized in Japan until the ICH-E9 guideline “Statistical Principles for Clinical Trials” was implemented in 1998.