Posted on Thursday, June 6, 2019
The 33rd New England Statistics Symposium (NESS) was held at the
Hartford Hilton hotel (May 15-17) and was hosted and organized by the
Department of Statistics of the University of Connecticut (UConn).
The theme of the symposium was “Statistical Data Science in Action”
and it featured a few “firsts”. For the first time the event spanned
three days, instead of two. The first Chernoff award was given to
Shaw-Hwa Lo from Columbia University. We were excited and honored to
have Prof. Chernoff in the audience. For more information about the
award, see https://nestat.org/hcaward/. We also had the first
Travelers Stat-a-thon.
In total, close to 500 people registered for NESS 2019, including many
from the industry, and many students. We had four successful short
courses, and four plenary talks. Dr. Samuel Kou from Harvard
University presented his talk on “Big Data, Google and Disease
Detection: A Statistical Adventure”, and Drs. David Rosenberg and
Amanda Stent (from Bloomberg) discussed “Machine Learning for
Structured and Unstructured Data in Finance”. During the banquet
Dr. Anthony D’Amico (from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham &
Women’s Hospital) presented his work, titled “Improving Patient
Outcomes in Prostate Cancer by Partnering Statistics and Medicine”,
and Dr. Shaw-Hwa Lo gave the inaugural Chernoff lecture. We were
delighted to celebrate Rick Vitale’s 75th birthday with a special
session titled “Probability, Statistics and Geometry”, chaired by
Dr. David Pollard (Yale University), with three distinguished guests
speakers – Andrew Barron (Yale University), David Donoho (Stanford
University), and Subhashis Ghoshal (North Carolina State
University). The session was recorded, and can be viewed online at
https://totalwebcasting.com/view/?func=VOFF&id=uconn&date=2019-05-17&seq=1.
We closed the symposium with the award ceremony, which included the
IBM Student Paper, Liberty Mutual Student Poster, and Travelers
Stat-a-thon.
The event was supported by Munich Re Group - Hartford Steam Boiler
Inspection and Insurance Co.; Travelers Insurance; Liberty Mutual
Insurance; Pfizer; IBM; Taylor-Francis; and the ASA CT Chapter. We are
grateful to these generous sponsors, and to the many people who
helped, including our enthusiastic group of graduate student
volunteers, UConn’s University Events and Conference Services, the
Hilton staff and PSAV team.
Report contributed from Dr. Haim Bar on behalf of the Organizing
Committee.