UP-STAT 2020

Call for Abstracts
Ninth Joint Conference of the Upstate Chapters of the American Statistical Association
Rochester, NY, April 17-18, 2020

You are cordially invited to submit an abstract for presentation at the Ninth Joint Conference of the Upstate Chapters of the American Statistical Association, which will be held at the University of Rochester on Friday and Saturday, April 17-18, 2020. The deadline for abstract submission is Friday, March 27, 2020.

The UP-STAT conference series aims to serve as a friendly and empowering forum for the annual gathering of statisticians, applied mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and data scientists from upstate New York and its neighboring regions. Graduate students and advanced undergraduate students involved in research are especially welcome and strongly encouraged to present their research.

The theme for this year’s meeting is “Quantifying Uncertainty and Taming Risk by Harnessing Statistical and Data Science Tools and Methods.” We are soliciting abstract submissions related to the theme of the conference, but we also welcome submissions related to the analysis of data from all fields of application. We are interested in contributions to statistical methodology as well as to statistical practice, consulting, and education. Moreover, we would welcome submissions at the interface of statistics and other disciplines such as computer science, environmental studies, biology/medicine, social sciences, and business/finance.

• Novel contributions to statistical methods or computing – If you have developed new statistical methods or approaches to the analysis of data, we strongly encourage you to consider submitting an abstract to present your work.
• Applications of statistical methods to interesting data sets from environmental studies, biology/medicine, social sciences, business/finance, and other fields – If you are an applied statistician working in academia or in industry, and have worked on interesting problems involving the analysis of complex (possibly large) data sets, then consider submitting an abstract to present your problem and the analysis that you performed to gain insight into your scientific question.
• Issues in statistics / data science education – If you have taught courses related to statistics or data science to high school students, undergraduate students, or graduate students, consider giving a presentation on novel approaches that you may have implemented. Presentations that touch on the role that other disciplines should play in developing curricula in these fields would also be of great interest.

The Program Committee strongly encourages all participants to seriously consider organizing a session on a statistics/data science theme of their choice. All sessions must have a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 3 speakers. Please note that each session will be 45-50 minutes in duration. It will be the responsibility of the session organizer to invite the speakers and ensure that the speakers attend the conference. The session organizer may also be a speaker in his/her session. All session organizers who are students will have their conference fees (registration and Friday night dinner) waived and will receive an UP-STAT 2020 Young Scientific Leader Award. If you choose to organize a session, you should submit the following information to the Conference Program Chair, Dr. Michael McDermott: organizer’s name, session title, and presenter names, affiliations (department/institution or company), e-mail addresses, titles, and abstracts. Abstracts should follow the general guidelines provided below. Please indicate UP-STAT 2020 Session Proposal in the “Subject” line of the e-mail and also indicate whether or not each session participant (including the organizer) is a student. The deadline for submission of an organized session is Friday, March 20, 2020.

Abstracts must contain at most 250 words and should not contain any references. The deadline for the submission of the abstract is Friday, March 27, 2020, and notification of acceptance for a poster or oral presentation will be sent out on Friday, April 3, 2020. To submit your abstract, please send it to the Conference Program Chair, Dr. Michael McDermott. Please indicate UP-STAT 2020 Abstract in the “Subject” line of the e-mail and also indicate whether you are a student and whether you prefer to give an oral presentation or a poster presentation (or are willing to do either). Also, provide the title of your presentation, the affiliations of all authors (department/institution or company), and your e-mail address.

As you prepare your abstract and presentation, please keep in mind that the focus is not on technical rigor, but instead on clarity of exposition and ease of access by our audience, which may have a substantial number of students and AP Statistics teachers. As a matter of fact, we strongly encourage students and AP Statistics teachers to participate actively. All student presenters will have their conference registration fee (but not their Friday night dinner fee) waived. In addition, monetary prizes will be awarded to students for the best poster and oral presentations related to (1) statistical methods and (2) statistics/data science applications. Finally, a mentorship award will be presented to the faculty member who is a co-author on the most student presentations.

Presenters will have the option of submitting a detailed version of their unpublished work as a manuscript to be peer-reviewed and eventually published in the journal Mathematics for Applications, indexed by MathSciNet.

To further encourage student participation, we will hold a data analysis competition. A team of no more than 4 students may enter the competition by submitting their entry information on the conference website at https://www.rit.edu/science/upstat-2020. The information should indicate the team name, school, and the names and e-mail addresses of the team members. The data set will be accessible from the conference website on Saturday, February 29, 2020 to teams that have entered the competition. Teams will be required to submit a report (maximum of 10 pages) on their results by Saturday, April 9, 2020. Prizes will be awarded to the top 3 teams, all of whom will be asked to present their results at the conference. Further details concerning this competition are available on the conference website at https://www.rit.edu/science/upstat-2020.

The first day of the conference (Friday, April 17) will feature tutorials (workshops on topics of broad interest) from 12:00pm to 1:45pm and from 2:00pm to 3:45pm. As in previous years, there will be at least four appealing and compelling tutorials featuring state-of-the-art aspects of statistics, machine learning, and data science. Among others, there will be tutorials on high performance computing for machine learning and data science, social network modeling, and practical aspects of ensemble learning for data science, just to name a few. Additional details can be found on the conference website. Tutorials will be provided free of charge to registered conference participants. Space is limited, so reservations for a seat at a tutorial must be made through the conference website (https://www.rit.edu/science/upstat-2020) at or after the time of conference registration. The tutorials will be followed by a panel discussion on “Perspectives on Quantifying Uncertainty and Taming Risk” from 4:15pm to 5:30pm with representatives from both academia and industry.

This year, we are extremely fortunate to have Professor Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University as our keynote speaker. The title of his talk, to be presented on Saturday, April 18, is “Reliability Monitoring of a Heterogeneously Repaired System with Partially Relevant Recurrence Data”.

To encourage more interaction/networking among conference attendees, we will have a conference dinner on Friday, April 17. The poster presentations will be given during the cocktail hour (6:00pm to 7:00pm) followed by dinner (7:00pm to 9:00pm). Dinner registration is $50 for ASA members, $65 for nonmembers, and $15 for students and AP teachers (regardless of ASA membership). Please note that fees for the dinner are not included in the conference registration fees. Please see the conference website for the exact location of the conference dinner.

Please be sure to visit the conference website at https://www.rit.edu/science/upstat-2020 for more details on registration and other important aspects of the conference, including contact information for questions.

We eagerly look forward to seeing you at the Conference at the Rochester Institute of Technology on April 17-18, 2020.

Yours sincerely,
Michael P. McDermott, Ph.D.
UP-STAT 2020 Program Chair

Since its inception in 2012, the UP STAT conference series has uninterruptedly gathered the most eager practicing statisticians and data scientists of our beautiful upstate New York region every single year. Thanks to the remarkable and commendable commitment of statistical practitioners and faculty members along with their dedicated students from Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Rochester, St John Fisher College, Canisius College, SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo State, SUNY Fredonia, SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Oneonta, SUNY Oswego, SUNY Albany, Niagara University, Syracuse University, St Bonaventure College, SUNY Brockport, City University of New York (CUNY) and Cornell University. The conference has occasionally welcomed participants from as far as Carnegie Mellon University. The UP STAT conference series has become the annual gathering forum for all the statisticians and data scientists of upstate New York. With very little means, we have harnessed the talents of our volunteer organizing committee members to build the UP-STAT conference series into a very promising vehicle for cutting edge Statistical and Data Science education in our Upstate New York region.

UP-STAT 2018
UP-STAT 2016 at Canisius College

Past Atttendees (Interviews)

Michal Kucer
Gabriela Olinto
Andre Lobato Ramos
Matthew Corsetti (UP-STAT 2015)
Bohan Liu
Tyler Wilcox