A 5-day international conference,``The First Conference of the International Society for NonParametric Statistics'' is being planned to be held in Halkidiki, Greece, June 15-19, 2012.
NonParametric Statistics is not a new subject. Nevertheless, it has become more prominent in the 21st century since data have become abundant, and the computing power to analyze them is generally available. The aim of the PI and his collaborators is to bring together researchers from the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world in order to foster research on nonparametric inference with special emphasis on emerging fields such as: a) Nonparametric methodology for high dimensional data. b) Bootstrap, Empirical Likelihood, and related methods. c) Data depth and and related multivariate nonparametric methods. d) Dimension reduction, model selection, and related methods. e) Nonparametric machine learning. f) Nonparametric models for high dimensional mixed and random effects designs. g) Empirical process and semiparametrics. h) Bayesian Nonparametrics. i) Nonparametric methods for time series and Econometrics. j) Nonparametric methods for spatial processes. k) Wavelets and nonparametric functional estimation. l) Nonstandard Asymptotics in nonparametric inference.
The purpose of the conference is to facilitate the exchange of research ideas on all actively growing areas of nonparametric statistics, thereb giving the development of this important field of statistics a timely boost. This will also be the first conference of the newly formed International Society for NonParametric Statistics (ISNPS) whose mission is "to foster the research and practice of nonparametric statistics, and to promote the dissemination of new developments in the field via conferences, books and journal publications." ISNPS has a distinguished Advisory Committee that includes R.Beran, P.Bickel, R. Carroll, D. Cook, P. Hall, W. Hardle, R. Johnson, B. Lindsay, E. Parzen, P. Robinson, M. Rosenblatt, G. Roussas, T. SubbaRao, and G. Wahba, as well as a Charting Committee consisting of over 50 prominent researchers from all over the world. In particular, theprogram will provide a forum for junior and senior researchers alike to gain valuable experience interacting with leaders in their respective sub-areas,and for building new collaborations between researchers in Nonparametric Statistics from the US with researchers from all over the world.
(ISNPS) was very successful. The program involved a total of about 275 talks. There were approximately 220 Invited Talks (each 30 min. long), and approximately 50 Contributed Talks (each 20 min. long). In addition, there were 3 Plenary and 6 Special Invited Speakers, namely: Plenary speakers: Emmanuel Candes (Stanford and CalTech) Peter Hall (Univ. of Melbourne and UC Davis) Jon Wellner (Univ. of Washington) Special Invited Speakers: Laszlo Gyorfi (Budapest Univ.) Anestis Antoniadis (Univ. Joseph Fourier, Grenoble) Ingrid Van Keilegom (Univ. Catholique de Louvain) Bruce Lindsay (Penn State Univ.) Enno Mammen (Univ. of Mannheim) Peter Robinson (LSE) The full program is available from the website: http://isnpstat.org which---among other things---has links to the full program of talks as well as the Book of Abstracts. The conference’s impact on human resources is expected to be significant. Training and professional development are among the main reasons a scientist attends a conference in his/her field. Being exposed to cutting-edge research presentations by leading experts is an immense learning experience both in terms of depth—learning in detail the state-of-the-art in sub-areas of interest, but also in terms of breadth---learning first-hand what is happening in other areas that a researcher might have been unaware of. This is particularly true for junior researchers that were encouraged to participate to the conference. A volume with the Proceedings of the First ISNPS Conference is currently in preparation to be published by Springer, New York. The Editors of the volume are the conference organizers: M. Akritas, S.N. Lahiri and D.N. Politis.
