IASC News May 2019
The Conference of Data Science, Statistics & Visualisation (DSSV 2019)
The conference of Data Science, Statistics &
Visualisation (DSSV 2019) will take place on August 13-
15, 2019 in Kyoto, Japan. This conference is a satellite
meeting of the 62nd ISI World Statistics Congress. The
venue of DSSV 2019 is the Imadegawa Campus of
Doshisha University (neighboring Kyoto Imperial
Palace). The details can be found at the website. Via this
website, you can submit your abstract (deadline May 21,
2019), register for the conference (deadline June 14, 2019) and book your hotel in the area
close to the venue.
The conference consists of contributions to practical aspects of data
science, statistics and visualization. They cover topics such as
machine learning, verbalization of data, big data infrastructures and
analytics, advanced computing, and other important themes.
In addition, the invited talk sessions from the International Society
for Business and Industrial Statistics (ISBIS) and others will contribute to an exciting program.
The invited talk sessions include the three ones for the topics “Machine Learning”, “Bio-
Statistics/Informatics”, and “Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience” from Japanese
statistical societies and neuroscientist group.
The welcome reception and conference dinner will be held at the
areas close to the downtown, to which attendants can move from
the venue by courtesy buses. Since 794 to 1868, Japanese
emperors had lived in Kyoto, and there are 17 world heritages
(including Kiyomizu-dera presented right), each of which can be
reached by a half-day travel at most from the venue.
Course on Text as Data in Economics
LECTURER: Leif Anders Thorsrud | Norges Bank and BI Norwegian
Business School
The course introduces participants to economic literature in which text is
used as data and provides information on methods and software for
working with textual data. By the end of the course, you will know more
about how text can be, and has been, applied to answer economically
relevant questions. You will be able to do some analysis yourself and will
be well equipped to take more detailed and advanced courses on the topic.
The course is addressed to PhD and advanced Master’s students
interested in using text as data for economic analysis. Please send your
letter of motivation and CV as a PDF file to textasdata@zew.de by May
24, 2019. The decision on acceptance will be taken no later than June 7,
2019.
A preliminary course to learning the basics of Python will be provided on July 15 in the
afternoon. The participation fee is 80 Euros. Travel and accommodation costs have to be covered by the
participants.
ORGANISATION: Irene Bertschek · Georg Licht · Peter Winker
CONTACT: ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (Mannheim,
Germany) ZEW Research Departments “Digital Economy” and
“Economics of Innovation and Industrial Dynamics”
P.O. Box 10 34 43
68034 Mannheim · Germany
E-MAIL: textasdata@zew.de
INTERNET: www.zew.de/Textasdata2019
Fourth Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing (LACSC)
Call for Papers
The 4th Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing (LACSC 2019) will be held in
Guayaquil, Ecuador, from May 28-31, 2019. This international conference, will be held
together with the International Conference on Robust Statistics (ICORS), which is the most
important event in robust statistics. Its aim is to gather researchers interested in statistical
computing in Latin America and from other parts of the world, and is the official conference of
the Latin American Regional Section of the International Association for Statistical
Computing (LARS-IASC). More details about the 4 th LACSC can be found in our website.
Young researchers (up to 5 years after their last academic degree) attending the 4 th LACSC
will have the possibility to compete for the “Best LACSC 2019 Paper Award”.
2 nd LARS-IASC School on Computational Statistics and Data Science
As a satellite event of the 4 th LACSC, the 2 nd LARS-IASC School on Computational
Statistics and Data Science, under the topic “Robust Statistics”, which will be held in
Guayaquil, Ecuador, on 26-27 May, 2019. More information can be found here.
Call for Contributed Talks and Posters for the 2019 IASC-ARS Conference
2-5 December 2019, Hong Kong
The 11 th IASC-ARS Conference (https://saasweb.hku.hk/conference/iasc-ars2019/) will be
held at the University of Hong Kong, China, on December 2-5, 2019. The theme of the
conference is “Statistical Computing for AI and Big Data”. The aim of the conference is to
provide a forum for the discussion and exchange of ideas, new concepts and recent methods
in statistics. Philip Leung-ho Yu from the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science of
the University of Hong Kong will be the General Chair of the conference.
This conference will provide a platform for researchers from academia and industry to share
their latest findings, exhibit the latest studies and applications, and build up networks with
peers in variety areas, including but not limited to, Bayesian computation, big data analytics,
biostatistics, computer graphics, computer intensive inferential methods, data mining and
machine learning, econometrics, graphical models, image processing and uncertainty
quantification.
The conference will consist of keynote speeches, tutorials, invited talks, contributed talks and
posters. The official language for all submissions is English.
Submission of abstracts for contributed talks and posters may be made via the online
submission system. The submission deadline is May 31, 2019. All submissions will be
reviewed and selected by a panel of experts in the field. Authors will be notified of the review
panel’s decision by June 30, 2019. Click here for the poster of Call for Contributed Talks and
Posters for the details.
Keynote Speakers: Wolfgang Karl Hardle, Jun Liu, and Qiwei Yao
Local organizer: Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, The University of Hong Kong
We look forward to seeing you in Hong Kong to attend the IASC-ARS 2019 conference and
to experience the fusion of Chinese and Western cultures and beauty of Hong Kong!
Important Dates:
May 31, 2019 Deadline for submission of abstracts of invited talks/contributed
talks/posters
June 30, 2019 Notification of acceptance of contributed talks/posters
July 31, 2019 Early bird registration closes
December 2-5, 2019 Conference
2019 IFCS conference
The IFCS 2019 conference theme is ‘Data Analysis and Rationality in a Complex World’ and
will take place in the Thessaloniki Concert Hall, Thessaloniki, Greece. The venue is located
along the coast of the city, close to the city center and the airport. The conference opening will
take place on August 26 late afternoon and pre-conference workshops will be held. The
conference sessions will start on August 27 in the morning,
and will close on August 29 with a full day conference
program and a conference dinner. Details can be found at
https://ifcs.gr/. Abstract submission is currently open and
closes on May 5, 2019. The deadline for early bird
registration is May 26, 2019. IASC members qualify for
discounted registration fees.
The International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) was founded in 1985 and is
composed of many statistical societies all over the world. IFCS is an interdisciplinary and
international organisation whose main purposes are to promote the scientific study of
classification and clustering (including systematic methods of creating classifications from
data), and to disseminate scientific and educational information related to its fields of interests.
The conference will bring together some of the leading researchers and practitioners in the
related areas and will provide an opportunity for exchanging ideas, between researchers and
practitioners, and establishing networking and collaborations. Keynote speakers include Sofia
Olhede, Professor of Statistics at University College London and director of UCL’s Centre for
Data Science, Andy Mauromoustakos, Statistician for the AGRI STAT LAB at the University of
Arkansas Fayetteville campus, Julie Josse, Professor of Statistics at Ecole Polytechnique in
France specializing in missing data, visualization and the nonparametric analyses of complex
data structures, David Hunter, Professor at Penn State Department of Statistics working on
statistical computing, models for social networks, and statistical clustering, Michael Greenacre,
Professor of Statistics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona working mostly on
correspondence analysis and on compositional data analysis, Theodoros Evgeniou, Professor
of Decision Sciences and Technology Management at INSEAD in France and an Academic
Director of INSEAD eLab, a research and analytics center, Vladimir Batagelj, Professor
Emeritus of the University of Ljubljiana, Slovenia, known for the book he coauthored on
Generalized Blockmodeling and Maria-Florina Balcan, Associate Professor at the School of
Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University where her main research interests are in
machine learning, artificial intelligence, and theoretical computer science.
The conference city was founded in 315 BC by Cassander, in honor of his wife Thessaloniki,
sister of Alexander the Great. Since then, and due to its strategic position, Thessaloniki has
been a commercial and cultural crossroad that brought together people and ideas from all over
the world. The signs of this uninterrupted urban activity for more than 2,300 years are evident
in each corner of the city. Nowadays, Thessaloniki is a big, modern city, with a population of
around one million, and an important administrative and financial center of the Balkans. The
warm and vibrant city life is largely influenced by the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki; the largest university in Greece, with more than 72,000
undergraduate and 8,000 postgraduate students. Thessaloniki is surrounded by
places of great natural and historic beauty such as Olympus National Park,
Vergina, where the Royal tomb of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great was
found, the autonomous Mouth Athos, which is forbidden to women and
children, and Halkidiki with its beautiful sandy beaches.
Cluster Benchmarking Challenge Call
Neutral Benchmarking Studies of Clustering
The Cluster Benchmarking Task Force of the International Federation of Classification
Societies (IFCS) is calling for neutral benchmarking studies in cluster analysis. This call is part
of a challenge connected with the 2019 IFCS conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, August 26-29.
To achieve a cumulative building of knowledge on clustering and classification, careful
attention to benchmarking (performance comparison of methods) is very important. New
methods of data pre-processing, new data-analytic techniques, and new methods of output
post-processing, should be extensively and carefully compared with existing alternatives, and
existing methods should be part of neutral comparison studies. Benchmarking studies can
frequently been found in supervised learning, but are less common in unsupervised learning.
The Task Force has written a white paper (see the preprint) that addresses the theoretical and
conceptual underpinnings of benchmarking in cluster analysis, and some practicalities for
performing sound benchmarking studies. The Task Force is now calling for individuals to
contribute neutral benchmarking studies on cluster analysis as part of a challenge.
Rules for submission:
• Contributions for the challenge must be e-mailed to Iven.VanMechelen@kuleuven.be.
• A contribution should comprise a report on a benchmarking study in the context of
cluster analysis. This report should have a length of between 5 and 15 pages, including
text, tables, figures and references; other materials can be submitted as separate files.
• The benchmarking study may compare methods of data pre-processing, clustering
(potentially but not necessarily including the estimation of cluster parameters such as
the number of clusters), and/or output post-processing, and may use empirical or
simulated data.
• Contributors should have a neutral point of view with respect to the methods studied in
the contribution. This means that they should not be an author or co-author of one or
more of the studied method(s). It is also expected that the contributors do not have a
personal interest to promote any of the involved methods in particular.
• The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2019, 12:00 pm CET.
Competition guidelines:
• Contributions to the challenge will be evaluated by the IFCS Task Force on Benchmarking.
• Major evaluation criteria will be:
• the technical correctness and clarity of the report,
• that the study shows a critical reflection on principles on which a sound
benchmarking study should be based (which may be either in line or at odds
with the principles outlined in the white paper contributed by the Task Force),
• a detailed specification of the choices made in the benchmarking study at issue
along with a justification of these based on the principles referred to above.
• Up to 8 contributions will be selected for a short presentation during one or two invited
sessions at the 2019 IFCS conference in Thessaloniki, Greece (such a presentation
will not conflict with giving another presentation at that conference). The authors of the
selected contributions will be notified no later than April 25, 2019. Authors of selected
contributions who cannot attend the conference will be invited to prepare a few slides
on their contribution.
• During WWthe closing session of the IFCS conference one or two of the selected
contributions will be proclaimed winners of the challenge. The winners will receive a
CRC/Chapman and Hall book voucher.
• Contact for questions: Iven.VanMechelen@kuleuven.be.
All researchers interested in clustering and classification are most welcome to
participate in this challenge!
Task force members: Anne-Laure Boulesteix, Rainer Dangl, Nema Dean, Isabelle Guyon,
Christian Hennig, Friedrich Leisch, Douglas Steinley, Iven Van Mechelen, and Matthijs Warrens.
New IASC and Taylor & Francis Affiliate Program and Discounts on Book Purchases for IASC Members
IASC and Taylor & Francis have agreed on a new affiliate program that gives IASC members
a 20% discount on book purchases.
IASC is pleased to announce its new affiliate agreement with Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis
(and their CRC Press and Chapman & Hall branches) are the publishers of numerous statistical
book series such as The R Series and Texts in Statistical Science and of numerous books in
the area of Computational Statistics.
Our agreement with Taylor & Francis offers current IASC members a 20% discount on book
purchases when initiated through the IASC web page. You have to start at iasc-isi.org and
then click on the “IASC ISI Members Save 20% on CRC Press Books” link at the bottom of this
page. This redirects you to the IASC ISI web page maintained by Taylor & Francis / CRC
Press. Make your online order as usual. At the time of checkout, please enter IAS18 as promo
code (if necessary). Enjoy your discounted book purchases from Taylor & Francis.
DOWNLOAD: 2019-05_IASC