Deal All,
We write to invite you to
join an exciting adventure with us: the
establishment of the New England Statistical Society (NESS) and
its flagship journal. As many of you are aware, the
New England Statistical Symposium has just
celebrated its thirtieth gathering last year. Ever
since its launch at UConn in 1987 at the suggestion
of Herman Chernoff, the symposium has been an
intimate annual gathering of our large statistical
family in the region, and through its course it has
greatly fostered the growth and unity of our
community. To sustain such a success and build upon
its lasting legacy, it seems to us beneficial to
form a society. But we do not intend to create yet
another regional society -– we all have too much on
our plates to dilute further our limited energy or
time with something routine.
Rather, we envision NESS to
be an engine to mobilize the abundant pedagogical
and research resources in New England area to
promote and sustain the growth and expansion of
statistical science as one of the two fundamental
pillars of Data Science (the other being computer science). With
the emergence of data science and the growth of
technological innovations including social media, we
see tremendous opportunities, as well as urgency, to
integrate statistical research and education. For
example, with NESS, we can pool our talents to
produce educational products, including short course
videos, talks about cutting-edge research, online
tutorials and live webinar, etc. All these products
can be used for general public, as well as for high
school students, as a part of our effort to build
larger pipelines of talents for statistics and data
science.
We aim to launch a rather
unique journal: The New England Journal of
Statistics in Data Science. It is unique because it
will focus on the roles of statistics (and statisticians) in
Data Science. We can explore many newer ways of
publication, including a variety of columns aiming
for readers with different interests or backgrounds;
monitored blog-style open discussions followed by
periodic authors’ rejoinders, eventually forming a
“topic thread”; and immediate publication upon
acceptance with retrospective indexing for archiving
purposes; etc.
Clearly we need many
creative minds and sustainable passions to make all
these not just a wishful thinking. We believe that
you are likely one of those who either share our
dream and/or who can help to realize it. We
therefore sincerely invite you to join our
adventure.
