IASC News October 2019

Report of ICORS-LACSC 2019

The 4th edition of the Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing (4th LACSC) took
place on May 28-31, 2019 at ESPOL Polytechnic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador. For this
year’s edition, LACSC was jointly organized with the International Conference on Robust
Statistics (ICORS), which is an important event worldwide in the field of robust statistics.
ICORS-LACSC 2019 had 115 participants that came from 17 different countries. In total, 94
presentations were organized in 4 Keynote Sessions, 10 Invited Paper Sessions –one of them
an IBIS-IPS, 17 Contributed Paper Sessions and Poster Session. The Keynote speakers of
ICORS-LACSC 2019 were:

• Stefan Van Aelst (KU Leuven, Belgium),
• Dirk Eddelbuettel (University of Illinois, USA),
• Ana Bianco (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) and
• Gareth James (University of Southern California, USA).

Among the Invited speakers we had:

• Xuming He (University of Michigan, USA),
• Vanda Lourenço (The New University of Lisbon, Portugal),
• Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser (University of Geneva, Switzerland),
• Verónica González-López (University of Campinas, Brazil),
• Martha Bohórquez-Castañeda (National University of Colombia),
• Daniela Rodríguez (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina),
• Klaus Nordhausen (TU Wien, Austria),
• Paulo Canas Rodrigues (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil),
• David Muñoz (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México),
• Nalini Ravishanker (University of Connecticut, USA),
• Francisco Louzada (University of São Paulo, Brazil), among others.

Several topics were covered during the conference that included advances in Bayesian
Statistics, Stochastic Processes, Optimization heuristics, Robust and Clustering Methods in
Time Series Analysis, Functional Data Analysis, Statistical Software, Parallel Computing, Deep
Learning, Distribution Theory, Multivariate Statistics, Statistical Modeling, Statistical Inference,
Spatial Statistics, Robust estimation and inference as well as applications to Economics,
Finance, Quality Control, Social Sciences, Environmental Sciences, among others.
The Scientific Program Committee (SPC) of LACSC was chaired by Paulo Canas Rodrigues
while the SPC of ICORS was chaired by Peter Rousseeuw (KU Leuven, Belgium). The Chair of the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) was Holger Cevallos-Valdiviezo (ESPOL
Polytechnic University, Ecuador). ICORS-LACSC 2019 had the support of the Tourism Office
of Guayaquil. In addition, 23 full and partial scholarships were granted to participants from
developing countries, under the sponsorship of IASC. As in the past LACSC editions, the Latin
American Regional Section of the International Association for Statistical Computing (LARS-
IASC) organized the Best Paper Award and the Best Poster Award competition. This year, the
winners were:
Best Paper Award:

“On moments of folded and truncated multivariate extended skew-normal distributions”
authored by Christián Galarza, Larissa Matos and Victor Lachos.
“A general dynamic factor approach to forecast conditional covariance matrices in
high-dimensional data” authored by Carlos Trucios Maza.

Best Poster Award:

“Implications of assumptions verification in the means comparison tests” authored by
Pablo Flores and Jordi Ocaña.
“Classification for geostatistical functional data using depth” authored by Angie
Navarrete, Rubén Guevara, Martha Bohórquez-Castañeda and Jan Bacca.

ICORS-LACSC 2019 was a unique opportunity for these two statistical communities to gather together.
Participants from both communities had the opportunity to mingle during the conference itself
and during the social events. The social events included a city tour to Guayaquil Downtown and the
Conference Dinner. During the city tour, participants had the opportunity to visit the Iguana Park where the green iguanas were observed resting on trees and gardens, Guayaquil Cathedral, Malecón 2000 located next to the Guayas river, the hillside village
of “Las Peñas” with its colorful and Spanish architectural style houses, “La Perla” Ferris Wheel
where the participants could have a panoramic view of the city, and the Artisanal Market. The
conference dinner was held at “Casa Julián” restaurant in Guayaquil Historic Park. The
conference dinner started with a guided tour around historical houses in the park where
participants could learn about the lifestyle of Guayaquileneans during the colonial period and
enjoyed traditional performances such as “Amorfinos” and typical dances of the Ecuadorian
coastal region. Motivated by the atmosphere, some participants joined the performers and
showed off their latin dancing skills. After the performances, a traditional Ecuadorian meal was
served.

ICORS-LACSC 2019 was a successful conference. The Book of Abstracts, the full program
and pictures containing great memories of the conference can be found at icors-lacsc-
2019.com.

Report of 2nd LARS-IASC School on Computational Statistics and Data Science

The 2nd LARS-IASC School on Computational Statistics and Data Science was held at ESPOL
Polytechnic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on May 26-27, 2019. This was a satellite event
of ICORS-LACSC 2019. The school was organized by LARS-IASC and ESPOL Polytechnic
University.

The school theme of this edition was Robust Statistics. The instructors were Prof. Peter
Rousseeuw and Prof. Stefan Van Aelst, both from KU Leuven (Belgium). The program included
the following topics: introduction to robust statistics, robust multivariate methods, robust
regression, robust PCA, advanced topics on robust statistics and recent developments. The
School gathered 20 participants: 13 from Ecuador, 2 from México, 1 from Brazil, 1 from Chile,
1 from Ghana, 1 from Panama, and 1 from Venezuela. As for the conference, IASC supported
7 full scholarships and 1 partial scholarship for participants of the 2nd LARS-IASC School
coming from developing countries.

 

Forthcoming Event: Fifth Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing LACSC 2020

The Department of Statistics and the Department of Industrial & Operations Engineering of the
Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) are proud to announce the V Latin American
Conference on Statistical Computing (LACSC 2020) to be held in Mexico City from June 9 to
June 11, 2020.
LACSC is the annual conference of the Latin American Regional Section of the International Association for Statistical Computing (LARS-IASC). The main purpose of LACSC is to foster the progress
of the theory, methods and practice of statistical computing in Latin America. In 2020 we will have the 5th edition of LACSC in Mexico
City, following its previous annual editions in Gramado (Brazil), Valparaíso (Chile), San José (Costa Rica), and Guayaquil
(Ecuador). LACSC invites contributions on Statistical Computing, Data Science, Multivariate Statistics, Classification, Data Mining, Optimization, Modeling, Applications, Big Data, Optimization
Heuristics, Machine Learning, among others.

 

Forthcoming Event: COMSTAT Conference, Bologna, 2020

The 24th International Conference on Computational Statistics will take place at the University
of Bologna, Italy, 25-28 August 2020.
The website has been launched: www.compstat2020.org.
The following 3 keynote speakers confirmed their participation:

• Igor Pruenster (Bocconi University, Italy),
• Holger Dette (Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany), and
• Jean-Michel Zakoian (ENSAE, France).

The conference will comprise 8 invited special sessions and 53 organized invited sessions.
The organizers also encourage contributed talks and posters. The abstract submission
deadline is 17 April 2020 for invited and organized sessions and 15 May 2020 for contributed
talks.

Call for Contributed Talks and Posters for the 2019 IASC-ARS Conference – 2-5 December 2019, Hong Kong

The 11th IASC-ARS Conference (saasweb.hku.hk/conference/iasc-ars2019) will be held at the
University of Hong Kong, China, on 2-5 December 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 a variety of 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 (www.conftool.org/iasc-ars2019). The submission deadline is 31 May
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 30 June 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:

31 May 2019 Deadline for submission of abstracts of invited talks/contributed
talks/posters
30 June 2019 Notification of acceptance of contributed talks/posters
31 July 2019 Early bird registration closes
2-5 December 2019 Conference

Report of DSSV 2019

The 2019 edition of the IASC organised conference on Data Science, Statistics, and
Visualisation (DSSV 2019) took place on August 13-15, 2019, at Doshisha University in Kyoto,
Japan, as a satellite meeting of the 62nd ISI World Statistics Congress. The conference had
216 attendants from fifteen countries. Several state-of-the-art presentations were given
covering these fields. Among these were the three keynote speakers of DSSV-2019: Di Cook
(Monash Univ., Australia), Kwan-Liu Ma (Univ. of California, USA), and Richard Samworth
(Univ. of Cambridge, UK). In addition, there were four invited talks that were presented by
Genevera Allen (Rice Univ., USA), Yongdai Kim (Seoul National Univ., Korea), Hidetoshi
Shimodaira (Kyoto Univ., Japan), and Huixia Judy Wang (George-Washington Univ., USA).
Nine invited sessions with a total of 23 talks were organised by, amongst others, the Japanese
Statistical Society, the Japanese Society for Computational Statistics, and the International
Society for Business and Industrial Statistics (ISBIS). There were eighteen contributed paper
sessions, with a total of 59 presentations and 37 poster presentations.
The scientific program committee (SPC) was chaired by Peter Filzmoser (TU Wien, Austria)
and the local organising committee had chairman is Kohei Adachi (Osaka Univ., Japan) and
vice chairman is Hiroshi Yadohisa (Doshisha University). The conference was cosponsored by
the Japan Statistical Society (JSS), the Japanese Society of Computational Statistics (JSCS),
and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. Special attention at in the opening ceremony was
given to the newly established open access IASC Journal of Data Science, Startistics, and
Visualisation (jdssv.org) where Patrick Groenen (Erasmus Univ. of Rotterdam, Netherlands)
announced a call for papers.
The well attended welcome-reception was held at a restaurant close to the Yasaka pagoda.
The reception started with a traditional Japanese ceremony “Kagami-Wari”, in which a wood
barrel of Japanese Sake is opened by cracking the lid of the barrel with wooden hammers. The
conference dinner took place at a restaurant at the Kamo river bank and Gojo street. A
traditional Japanese meal was served and dances were performed by traditional Kyoto
Geishas.
We can look back at a successful edition of DSSV. More details and a full program of DSSV
2019 can be found at dssv2019.iasc-isi.org. The next edition will take place at Duke University,
Durham NC, USA from July 29-31, 2020, see dssv2020.iasc-isi.org.

 

News from the IASC Executive Committee (October 2019)

After the joint meeting of outgoing and incoming members of the IASC Executive Committee
(EC) at the ISI WSC in Kuala Lumpur on August 19, 2019, the new EC started its discussions
via Loomio in September.
Core Officers of the IASC 2017-2019 EC are (visit iasc-isi.org/executive-committee for photos):

• President: Jürgen Symanzik (United States)
• President-Elect: Christophe Croux (France)
• Past President: Wing Kam Fung (Hong Kong)
• Scientific Secretary: Abbass Sharif (United States)
• Treasurer: Sugnet Lubbe (South Africa)
• Webmaster: Han-Ming Wu (Taiwan)
• Executive Director: Ada van Krimpen (ex officio) (The Netherlands)
• ARS Chairperson: Philip Leung-ho Yu (ex officio) (Hong Kong)
• ERS Chairperson: Peter Winker (ex officio) (Germany)
• LARS Chairperson: David F. Muñoz (ex officio) (Mexico)
• Chair of the CS-DMv KD Committee: Ali Serhan Koyuncugil (ex officio) (Turkey)

Other officers of the 2017-2019 EC are:

• ISI WSC Conference Officer: Anne Ruiz Gazen (France)
• ISI Nominations Officer: Rosaria Lombardo (Italy)
• Publication Officer: Paulo Canas Rodrigues (Brazil)
• Summer School Officer: Francisco Louzada (Brazil)
• Young Statisticians Representative: Yoshikazu Terada (Japan)
• Membership Officer: Ying Chen (Singapore)
• Data Analysis Competition Officer: Zdenek Hlavka (Czech Republic)
• Outreach Officer: Luis Firinguetti (Chile)
• IASC Statutes Review Officer: Berwin Turlach (Australia)

Some of the first topics discussed among the new EC members were the ending of the World
Bank funding that supported some IASC projects in the past, the use of potential donations to
IASC, and how to support students at an upcoming IASC School in Mexico City in 2020.

Download: 2019-10_IASC