International Association for Statistical Computing

IASC Activities Report 2007-2009

During last two years, the Association has been active and productive. IASC members, under the IASC auspices, have organized many scientific events and have been extremely active in many other fields, especially as concerns publications.

Mission Statement and Objectives

It is the mission of the IASC to embed traditional statistical methodology, modern computer technology, and the knowledge of domain experts in order to convert data into information and knowledge.

The Association pursues its objectives with special attention to developing countries. It promotes collaborative efforts within international, national, regional and other organizations and institutions having similar aims; it fosters evaluations of statistical computing techniques and programs and facilitates the exchange of computer programmes and the organisation of meetings, particularly in conjunction with World Statistics Congresses of the International Statistical Institute (ISI).

The objectives of the Association are to foster world-wide interest in effective statistical computing and to exchange technical knowledge through international contacts and meetings between statisticians, computing professionals, organizations, institutions, governments and the general public.
Statistical computing is meant here in its broad sense as Statistics in the Communication and Computer age and it contains a rich variety of research topics in virtually any branch of statistical inquiry.

The IASC puts emphasis especially on computational statistics, statistical software, exploratory data analysis, data mining, pattern recognition, statistical databases and related fields, e.g.: Computational Finance, Statistical Computing and e-commerce, Statistical Computing and Customer Relation Management, Computer Intensive Methods in Statistical Methods, Statistical Computing for Census and Official Statistics, Statistical Methods for Large Data, Statistical Graphs and Data Visualization, Distributed Statistical Computing, GIS Applications, Multivariate Statistical Modelling and Data Analysis, Statistical Quality Control and Process Control, Environmental Statistics, Demographic and Health Science.

Established during the 41^st Session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1977, the International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC) motivates and supports research in a broad spectrum of areas of computational statistics. The IASC forms a Section of the ISI.

Activities

The IASC provides international contacts among statisticians, computing professionals, organizations, institutions, governments, and the general public world-wide.
The exchange of ideas and knowledge is achieved by organizing and sponsoring Conferences, by establishing regional Sections, by organizing summer schools, and by exploiting the benefits of electronic communication.

Currently two regional sections are established: the European Regional Section (ERS) and the Asian Regional Section.

The IASC seeks to extend its regional presence in all other parts of the world. Close contacts exist to the Interface Foundation of North America where the IASC is regularly sponsoring a session at the yearly INTERFACE meeting. IASC particularly works on its outreach to the Middle Eastern and South American Regional Sections

The European and Asian Regional Sections organize a variety of scientific conferences, e.g., IASC World Conferences, biennial COMPSTAT meeting, summer schools, workshops, and provide communication and knowledge exchange in their regions.

Past, forthcoming and future meetings and conferences

• 56^th ISI Session, Lisboa 2007
IASC (co)organized 12 IPMs.

• IASC’07 Conference, Aveiro (PT)
IASC’07 Conference in Aveiro, a Satellite Meeting to the 56^th ISI Session in Lisboa, has been successful from the scientific point of view; approximately 200 participants attended the Conference.

• COMPSTAT’08 Symposium, Porto (PT)
Approximately 400 participants attended the Symposium of the ERS IASC Compstat 2008 held in Porto. Next COMPSTAT Symposia will be held in Paris, COMPSTAT 2010, and in Cyprus, Compstat 2012.

• 4^th IASC World Conference and 6th ARS IASC Conference, Yokohama (JAP)
4^th IASC World Conference organized jointly with 6th ARS Conference were held in Yokohama during 5-8 December 2008. More than 300 talks were given: 2 keynote lectures; 4 invited lectures; 37 invited sessions. Three Satellite Meetings accompanied, one of them in Kyoto (Japan), another in Seoul (South Korea) and the last one in Taipei (Taiwan, China). 7th ARS IASC Conference will be held in 2011 in Taipei, Taiwan, China.

• 4^th International Workshop on Mining Complex Data MCD 2008, 15^th December 2008, Pisa (Italy)
The fourth international workshop on Mining Complex Data followed three previous meetings held in 2005 in conjunction with IEEE ICDM 2005, Houston, USA, in 2006 in conjunction with IEEE ICDM 2006, Hong Kong, SAR China, and in 2007 in conjunction with ECML/PKDD 2007, Warsaw, Poland. IASC was well represented by many of its members in the Scientific Programme Committee.

• ISBIS Regional Meeting, Cagliari (Italy), 30^th May-3^rd June 2009
The International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics (ISBIS, a Section of ISI), organized its Regional meeting in Cagliari, Sardegna Island (Italy), 30 May - 3 June 2009. IASC was a co-organizer of this successful meeting with more than 150 participants.

• 57^th ISI Session, Durban 2009
IASC (co)organized 10 IPMs.

• PLS’09 – 6^th International Conference on Partial Least Squares and Related Methods
The 6^th International Conference on Partial Least Squares and Related Methods (PLS'09) took place in Beijing, China, 4-7 September 2009. Professor Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi, who co-chairs the Program Committee, is an extremely active member of the IASC. Two IASC Past Presidents, i.e. Professor Carlo Lauro (Italy) and Professor Gilbert Saporta (France) are members of the Scientific Programme Committee. For details, see http://www.pls09.org/

• 10^th Summer School of ERS IASC
10^th IASC-ERS Summer School on “Computational Aspects in Environmental Statistics” was held in Pamporovo, Bulgaria, 7-11 September 2009. 35 participants from all over the world appreciated the lectures. For details, see http://info.meteo.bg/conferences/iasc09/

• 58^th ISI World Statistics Congress, Dublin 2011
IASC Programme Committee received 17 proposals for the invited paper sessions.

• 5^th IASC World Conference
The 5^th IASC World Conference is expected to be held in USA in the 2^nd quarter of 2011.

IASC Publications

• IASC’s official journal is Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (CSDA) published by Elsevier. The impact factor of CSDA has fatherly improved during the last years, being 1,029 in 2007 and 1,126 in 2008. In the year 2008, CSDA received around 1,000 submissions, the acceptation rate being around 0.25.
• IASC regularly contributes to the ISI Newsletter.
• Proceedings from the COMPSTAT Symposia are published by the Springer Verlag Company.
• Publications Committee of ISI is chaired by Abdel El-Shaarawi; Stefan Vanaelst represents IASC in this Committee.

Membership situation
The latest official member count (December 2008) gives a total number of 519 members; 504 individual members, 11 institutional members and 4 affiliated members. Compared to the December 2007 count, we have exactly the same number of individual members.

Note of thanks - Homage
On the occasion of the COMPSTAT 2008, Professor Norbert Victor, Germany, Past President of IASC, received a plaque of honour from IASC for his contribution to the IASC.

During the Conference of Japanese Statisticians held in September 2009, Professor Choichiro Asano (Japan) received a plaque of honour from IASC for his contribution to the computational statistics and foundation of the ARS IASC.

Jaromir Antoch, IASC President 2007-2009
Prague, 15 September 2009

IASC Election Results

According to the IASC Statutes, Yutaka Tanaka has chaired the Nominations Committee for the IASC elections. One half of the total members of the Council have been renewed. We remind everyone that there are twelve Council members and they stay in office for four years. IASC members have also elected their President-Elect, the Scientific Secretary, two Vice-Presidents and the Treasurer.

Yutaka Tanaka informs the Council that ballot sheets were sent back to the ISI Office and the votes were counted by Gerrit Stemerdink and Liliana Pinkasovych of the ISI Office. The voting sheets will be stored at the Permanent Office in The Hague and can be consulted at any time. At some point, they will be transferred to the ISI archive and will be stored there for an indefinite time.

The IASC Council for the period 2009-2011 is constituted as follows:
IASC President: Yutaka Tanaka (Japan)
IASC Past President: Jaromir Antoch (Czech Republic)
IASC President-Elect: Karen Kafadar (USA)

Vice-Presidents:
Maria Paula de Pinho de Brito Duarte Silva (Portugal)
Juergen Symanzik (USA)

Scientific Secretary:
Wataru Sakamoto (Japan)

Treasurer:
Michel van de Velden (The Netherlands)

Council Members 2007-2011:
Michael A. Adena (Australia)
Di Cook (USA)
Maria Paula de Pinho de Brito Duarte Silva (Portugal)
Gejza Dohnal (Czech Republic)
Chul Eung Kim (South Korea)
Friedrich Leisch (Germany)

Council Members 2009-2013:
Francisco de A.T. De Carvalho (Brazil)
Francesco Palumbo (Italy)
David Stephen Geoffrey Pollock (UK)
Mika Sato-Ilic (Japan)
Rand Wilcox (USA)
Philip L.H. Yu (Hong Kong, SAR China)

Report of the past events

Report of ARS Special Session in 2009 Meeting of Japanese Federation of Statistical Science Associations

ARS Special Session was successfully held at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan on 8th September 2009. The theme of the session was "Modern Statistical Methods and Computing". There were four speakers and four discussants, and about 40 participants from 4 countries. At the end of this session, a homage ceremony was held for Professor Chooichiro Asano (the second person from the left in the above picture) to acknowledge his great contributions to Computational Statistics, in particular, in the Asian region. Professor Asano was the founder of the Asian Reginal Section.

Moon Yul Huh
Chair, ARS

IASC-ERS Summer School

The IASC-ERS Summer School on “Computational Aspects in Environmental Statistics” was held during 7-11 September 2009 at hotel Panorama in the famous Bulgarian resort of Pamporovo in the Rhodopes Mountain, Bulgaria. (The venue of the Summer School had to be moved from Gorni Voden Monastery "St. Kirik and Yulita", district of Plovdiv, due to circumstances caused by the economic crisis.)
The event was organized jointly by the Bulgarian Statistical Society and National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The Life, Earth and Environmental Standing Committee of the European Science Foundation co-sponsored the IASC-ERS Summer School.
We had 25 participants as follows: Austria (1), Bulgaria (8), Czech Republic (5), FYR of Macedonia (1), Germany (1), Italy (1), Slovakia (1), Slovenia (1), Poland (1), Portuguese (1), Turkey (2) and Korea (2).
The Scientific Program and lecturers: (i) Prof. P. Filzmoser – Applied environmental statistics; (ii) Profs. N. Neykov and R. Gueorguieva - Modeling of environmental time series using Generalized Linear and Mixed Models; (iii) Prof. B. Grün - Flexible mixture modeling of environmental data and some computational issues; (iv) Profs. D. Jaruskova - Modeling environmental extremes; (v) J. Antoch - Change points detection in environmental time series data. Case studies application and software training were in R. A poster and 3 panel discussions were organized as well.
A half-day excursion was organized to the ethnographic village Shiroka Laka and the most interesting natural phenomena in the Rhodopes Mountain the Yagodinska and Devil’s Throat caves.

Neyko Nekov

The participants of the IASC-ERS Summer School.

Forthcoming events

Compstat 2010, Paris

The COMPSTAT 2010 Symposium will take place in Paris, 22-27 August, on the premises of Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), located in the heart of Paris.
The Conference will be organized by CNAM statisticians with the support of INRIA, the French National Institute in Computer Science and Control (http://www.inria.fr/index.en.html).
The Local Organizing Committee is chaired by Gilbert Saporta (CNAM), with Yves Lechevallier from INRIA as Vice-Chair.

Contributed papers as well as posters are welcome in the following fields:
• Biostatistics, Bio-computing and Genomics
• Categorical Data Analysis
• Clustering and Classification
• Computational Bayesian Methods
• Computational Econometrics and Finance
• Data Mining
• Design of Experiments
• Functional Data Analysis
• Graphical Models
• Graphics and Data Visualization
• Machine Learning and Support Vector Machine
• Numerical Methods and Software
• Multivariate Data Analysis
• Nonparametric Statistics and Smoothing
• Risk Analysis
• Robustness
• Simulation and Resampling Methods
• Spatial Statistics and Image Analysis
• Symbolic Data Analysis
• Time Series Analysis and Signal Processing

The deadline for submitting a contributed paper or a poster presentation is 10 January 2010. Best contributed papers will be published together with invited papers in the proceedings book by Physica Verlag.
Refer to the website http://www.compstat2010.fr/ for details about submission and registration.

The keynote lectures will be given by:
• Luc Devroye (McGill University, Montreal)
• Lutz Edler (German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg)
• David Hand (Imperial College, London)

Three tutorials will be organized:
• Bayesian computation method
Organiser: Jean-Michel Marin
(Université Montpellier II, France)
• Machine learning and association rules
Organisers: Petr Berka, Jan Rauch
(University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic)
• Statistical approaches for complex data
Organiser: Lynne Billard
(University of Georgia, United States)

The programme of the 14 invited sessions is now available on the website http://www.compstat2010.fr/
Contact e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Gilbert Saporta
Chair of COMPSTAT 2010

2010 ARS Interim Meeting

ARS student session will be held during the Korean Statistical Society (KSS) meeting next year (2010). The KSS meeting is held twice a year (early June, outside Seoul and early November, within Seoul vicinity).
ARS student session will be held during one of the two meetings. Partial funding (local expenses) will be provided by KSS. 10-15 graduate students and a few professors from outside Korea are expected. Participants from ERS are welcome. The objective of this meeting is to promote closer international relationship and cooperation among the prospective students. Area of interests will be open to all subjects. There will be presentations by students, but there will be no competition.
Details of the Meeting will be announced around the mid-November of this year.

Moon Yul Huh
Chair, ARS
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Joint Meeting of 7^th Conference of the Asian Regional Section of the International Association for Statistical Computing and 2011 Taipei International Statistical Symposium

The Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, will host The Joint Meeting of 7^th Conference of the Asian Regional Section of the International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC) and 2011 Taipei International Statistical Symposium from 16 to 19 December 2011 at Academia Sinica, jointly organized by the Asian Regional Section of the IASC, the Institute of Statistical Science, the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, R.O.C., and the Chinese Statistical Association. After the main Conference, a satellite workshop on "Statistical Computing in Quantitative Finance" will be held at the Feng Chia University in Taichung nearby attractive sightseeing spots such as Sun Moon Lake, Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village.
For more information on the main Conference, visit http://Joint2011.stat.sinica.edu.tw/, or contact Yuan-Chin Chang & Chun-houh Chen, Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Section 2, Taipei, Taiwan 115, China; (886) 2-27835611; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , and for the satellite workshop, http://workshop.stat.fcu.edu.tw/, or contact Dr. Cathy Chen, Department of Statistics, Feng Chia University, 100 Wenhwa Road, Seatwen, Taichung, Taiwan 40724, China; (886) 4-24517250 ext. 4412; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Conferences endorsed or sponsored by the IASC

In the spirit of co-operation with other scientific communities and/or ISI World Statistics Congresses, and aiming at having an even wider horizon of scientific relationships, the IASC Council - according to the IASC statute - may deliberate the sponsorship of conferences that are organized (or co-organized) by distinguished IASC members on topics close to the Computational Statistics.

Computational and Financial Econometrics
3^rd International Conference, 29-31 October 2009
Grand Resort Hotel, Limassol, Cyprus
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/cfe09

This Conference invites presentations that contain computational or financial econometric components. Papers containing strong computational statistical or econometric components or substantive data-analytic elements will be considered for publication in a special peer-reviewed (6^th special issue on Computational Econometrics), or regular, issue of the journal Computational Statistics & Data Analysis.
The Conference is endorsed by the IASC and takes place jointly with the ERCIM working Group meeting on Computing & Statistics.
For further information, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

2^nd International Workshop of the ERCIM Working Group on Computing & Statistics, 29-31 October 2009
Grand Resort Hotel, Limassol, Cyprus
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/ercim09/

The Workshop considers for presentation all topics within the interface of Computing & Statistics. The organization of tracks and suggestion of possible sessions within the framework of the Working Group are strongly encouraged.
The meeting is endorsed by the IASC and will take place jointly with the 3^rd International Conference on Computational and Financial Econometrics (CFE09).
For further information, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .