The Canadian
Statistical Sciences Institute Annual Meeting scientific
sessions were
held on May 25, 2013 at the Alumni House, University of
Alberta in
Edmonton. This year's theme was Spatial and Temporal
Modeling in
Climate Science and Public Health. The two speakers
were Richard
L. Smith of the University of North Carolina and SAMSI and
Patrick Brown
of the University of Toronto and Cancer Care Ontario.
Richard Smith spoke about the influence of climate change on extreme
weather events. Patrick Brown gave an overview of spatial
statistics in public health. Both talks were excellent and
generated a fair amount of discussion, both formally and
informally.
Of the 38
attendees, 13 were students from the University of Alberta and
4 were
students from other universities in Ontario and Quebec.
The remainder
was mainly university faculty from across Canada.
A contribution
from PIMS supported this event including the facility
rental and
catering. A barbeque offered an opportunity for
networking and
further discussion. A poster provided by PIMS was
distributed to
all PIMS associated departments. Dr. K. C. Chough
of the
Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences organized all
the local
arrangements. Comments from the attendees were
generally very
positive. We are grateful to PIMS and the
University of
Alberta for their contributions to this meeting.
This
conference was held at the University of Waterloo, July 31 to
August 2,
2013, to celebrate the International Year of Statistics and
the launch of
CANSSI. It was co-sponsored by the University of
Waterloo, the
Fields Institute, CANSSI, and the Statistical Society of
Canada.
There were over 100 registrants, about 40% of whom
were students.
There were
altogether six sessions over the two-and-one-half days of the
conference, on
social networks, statistics in health, exploring complex
models,
modeling risk, modeling dependence, and statistical learning.
Although the themes of the sessions were different, there
were several
common threads: network concepts, dependence
modeling,
high-dimensional data with sparse structure, and complex
models for
dealing with data from a variety of sources and experimental
plans.
In each of the sessions, the invited talks were
followed by
panel discussions. The speakers were David Banks of
Duke
University, Barry Wellman of the University of Toronto, François
Théberge of
the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing (TIMC) and
the University
of Ottawa, Michael Kosorok of the University of North
Carolina
Chapel Hill, Richard Cook of the University of Waterloo,
Thérèse Stukel
of the Institute for Clinical and Evaluative
Sciences,
Derek Bingham of Simon Fraser University, Rob Deardon of the
University of
Guelph, Hansjoerg Albrecher of l'Université de
Lausanne,
Gordon Willmot of the University of Waterloo, Claudia Czado of
the Technische
Universität München, Ruodu Wang of the University of
Waterloo,
Marina Vannucci of Rice University, Steven Scott of Google,
and Bala
Rajaratnam of Stanford University.
The session
topics were in areas that are expected to be important to
CANSSI in the
next few years, and all presentations were of a very high
standard. Using the space outside the large lecture
hall in the
new Mathematics 3 building, furnished with round tables and
chairs,
provided excellent opportunities for discussing and networking
at breaks and
lunches. The banquet furnished an opportunity to
recognize
three Statistical Society of Canada Presidents (John Brewster,
Christian
Léger and Don McLeish) whose efforts had made CANSSI
possible.
Since late
summer, by far the largest event has been the writing of the
fifteen-page CANSSI Appendix to the applications of the three
mathematical sciences institutes (PIMS, Fields and CRM) to the
Collaborative and Thematic Resources Support in Mathematics and
Statistics (CTRMS) program of NSERC. The applications were due November
1. The amount being requested from NSERC is $405,000 per year on
average for the period 2014-2019, as pledged collectively by the three
institutes. The Fields Institute has promised an additional $100,000.
The strong support that CANSSI has received from the SSC and from
universities across the country has been and will be very important in
this process. The traditional institute site visits have been replaced
this time by meetings with the review committees at NSERC's
headquarters in Ottawa in January.
The first
annual competition for CANSSI Collaborative Research Team
(CRT) projects
is winding up, with final recommendations of the CANSSI
Scientific
Advisory Committee expected to be approved for funding at the
December Board
meeting, subject to renewal of NSERC support of the
mathematical
sciences institutes.
The call for
Letters of Intent for the next competition is expected to
be issued in
November, with a due date of April 30, 2014. An
information
session is being developed to assist researchers interested
in applying, and
the timing will be announced at a later date.