RSS 2013 Conference
The plenary speakers for the RSS 2013 Conference have been confirmed as follows:
Sir Mark is the Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government and Head of the Government Office for Science.
Previously, Sir Mark was Director of the Wellcome Trust, which is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health by supporting the brightest minds. Before joining the Trust he was Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of Medicine at Imperial College London.
He has been a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology since 2004. He has also been a member of the India UK CEO Forum, the UK India Round Table and the advisory board of Infrastructure UKand a non-executive member of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research. He is a member of a number of international advisory bodies.
He has undertaken independent reviews for the UK Government on the use and sharing of personal information in the public and private sectors: ‘Data Sharing Review’ (2009); and secondary education: ‘Science and Mathematics: Secondary Education for the 21st Century’ (2010).
He received a knighthood in the 2009 New Year Honours List for services to medical research and was elected as Fellow of The Royal Society in 2011.
Doug Altman (Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Oxford)
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne – The Bayesian Revolution
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is a former newspaper reporter and editor and co-author of physics articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Besides The Theory That Would Not Die, she is the author of Nobel Prize Women in Science, biographies of 15 leading scientists, published by the National Academy Press. Her history of the chemical industry and environmental pollution — Prometheans in the Lab — was published by McGraw-Hill. McGrayne lives in Seattle, Washington, USA.
Sheila Bird (MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge)
RSS 2012 Conference
Hal Varian and Martine Durand led the line-up of top speakers at the RSS 2012 International Conference.
Hal Varian
Hal Varian, who gave the Campion (Presidents Invited) Lecture during the conference, is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has argued that with data in huge supply and statisticians in short supply, being a statistician has to be the ‘really sexy job for the 2010s’.
Martine Durand
Martine Durand, Chief Statistician at OECD, was the opening speaker at the conference looking at the topic of measuring national wellbeing from an international perspective.
The closing plenary session featured Anthony Davison (EPFL) and David Hand (Imperial College) talking about risk assessment in the natural environment and the business world respectively.
Busy wide-ranging programme
The Society’s conference board received an unprecedented number of proposals for invited sessions and those selected included the following wide-ranging topics:
- ageing in the 21st century
- Bayesian vs frequentist philosophies
- ‘big data’ challenges
- bioinformatics
- census outputs
- experimental design challenges in industry
- Fisher’s statistical legacy
- getting your point across: do’s, don’t and guidance
- have the cutbacks in statistical budgets undermined the statistical base?
- inequality in the UK
- keeping the media honest in covering statistics
- methodology for longitudinal studies
- measuring national well-being
- new developments in clinical trials
- open data and disclosure
- pharmaceutical statistics read paper
- recent advances in statistical computing
- retrospective read paper
- spatio-temporal environmental epidemiology
- statistical aspects of networks
- statistical genetics
- statistics and energy
- statistics and the Olympics
- stochastic volatility with jumps
- understanding user needs
- winners from the RSC and YSM conferences
This was also be the first RSS conference to include a dedicated ‘Professional development’ stream of talks and workshops including presentation skills, communicating statistics to the media, creating interactive web graphics with R, funding opportunities, professional statisticians forum, and revalidation for Chartered Statisticians. :