The fourth joint international meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) and ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis) will be held in Utah, U.S.A. from Wednesday, January 5 to Friday, January 7, 2011.
A central theme of the conference will be Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and related methods and applications in the 21 years since the publication of Gelfand and Smith (1990, JASA), the paper that introduced these methods to mainstream statisticians.
The conference will also feature three plenary speakers (Nicky Best, Mike Newton, and Jeff Rosenthal) and six invited sessions from internationally known experts covering a broad array of current and developing statistical practice:
- Environmental Health Statistics (organized by: Montse Fuentes)
- Modeling Dependence for High Throughput Data (organized by: Peter Mueller)
- Advances in MCMC for Genomics (organized by: Giovanni Parmigiani and Clelia DiSerio)
- MCMC for Computationally Intensive Inverse Problems (organized by: Dave Higdon)
- Bayes versus Frequentism in Observational Studies (organized by: Sander Greenland)
As with the first joint IMS-ISBA meeting in Isla Verde, Puerto Rico,and the second and third joint meeting in Bormio, Italy, nightly poster sessions will offer substantial opportunity for informal learning and interaction.
The meeting will take place at the conference center at "The Canyons", located approximately 40 minutes from the Salt Lake City (SLC) airport and readily accessible by public transport. The airport is a hub for Delta Airlines, now the world's biggest commercial air carrier. Limited financial support for the travel of junior investigators (< 5 years since PhD), especially those from economically disadvantaged countries, is also anticipated for those presenting in one of the two poster sessions; please click on the "Student Travel" link above for more information.
Also similar to the first MCMSki meeting, a preliminary "satellite" workshop on adaptive MCMC methods, "AdapSki", may be held just after the main conference on January 5-7, 2011. This workshop is intended to provide a snapshot of the methodological, practical and theoretical aspects of an emerging group of methods (adaptive MCMC, adaptive population Monte Carlo, and various breeds of adaptive importance sampling amongst others) that attempt to automatically optimize their performance for a given task. Check back for more information.