StATS: Where to go, where to go (January 11, 2006)

There are several interesting research conferences this year, and I have to decide quickly which one(s) to attend.

There is a local conference, the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Research Day. It will be held on Thursday, March 30 at the Kansas City Convention Center. The website for this conference, however, does not have much information yet.

Another local event is a day long training class, "Bayesian Clinical Trials" taught by Scott Berry. This class will be held on Friday, April 14 at the Kansas University Medical Center. The class does not have a lot of prerequisites, just "a basic understanding of statistics and clinical trials."

The shortest trip is to the Kansas State University's annual conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture. This year it is being held from April 30 to May 2. The short course on Sunday is on generalized linear models using SAS software. Every year, this conference has lessons on country line dancing on Monday night, which is a lot of fun. The actual talks have not been set yet.

The International Biometric Society has an annual meeting, usually in a place very exotic and far away. This year, the XXXIII International Biometric Conference will be held in Montreal, Canada, which is exotic, but not so far away. The conference is being held from Sunday, July 16 to Friday, July 21 with Wednesday being deliberately held open for social events, tours, and informal collaborations.

In North America, the IBS has two regions ENAR (Eastern North American Region) and WNAR (Western North American Region). The ENAR annual meeting was moved from New Orleans, LA to Tampa FL because of the damage from hurricane Katrina. This meeting goes from March 26 to March 29 and a prelimary program in PDF format is available.

The WNAR meeting is June 27-30 in Flagstaff, Arizona and a very brief (one page) preliminary program is available.

The Joint Statistics Meetings are August 5-10 in Seattle, WA. The American Statistical Association is the main sponsor of this meeting, but all of the Statistics Societies participate (hence the adjective "Joint"). An extensive set of web pages about the meetings are at the ASA web site (start here), but there are very few details yet. The preliminary program will be available on May31.

The day prior to the Joint Statistics Meetings (August 4), the University of Washington is holding a one day conference, Conference on Statistical Methods for Emerging Issues in Epidemiology and Observational Studies In Honor of Norman E. Breslow, on the University of Washington campus in Seattle, WA. The conference website lists some very prominent speakers (including Nicholas Day, Raymond, Carroll, Mitchell Gail, Louise Ryan, and Bradley Efron).

The Twenty-Ninth Annual Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop is May 22 to May 24 in Muncie Indiana. I have never attended this meeting, but they always seem to draw a good selection of talks and speakers. The web page for this conference has not yet been updated to 2006 and still has details of the 2005 conference.

I have been spending a lot of time with the statistics program R, and the second annual conference for R (userR 2006) is being held from June 15 to June 17 in Vienna, Austria. The web page for the userR 2006 conference lists the keynote lectures, tutorials, and a panel discussion on getting recognition for excellence in computational statistics.

I'm not sure which of these conferences I will end up attending, but they all look good.

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