International Call for Contributed Papers: Santa Cruz Bayesian data analysis workshop, 7-10 Aug 2003 Greetings, and apologies for cross-posting. I've written to this email user group earlier to say that the Statistics Group (which at present consists of David Draper, Thanasis Kottas, Herbie Lee, Raquel Prado, and Bruno Sanso) in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics (AMS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) has proposed to host an International Workshop on Bayesian Data Analysis at UCSC from Thursday (evening) through Sunday (afternoon) 7-10 August 2003, as a kind of satellite meeting to be held right after the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) nearby in San Francisco, CA, from August 3-7, 2003, and to ask all potentially interested people to mark their calendars. This message is to say that we have definitely secured enough funding to go forward with the Workshop (the meeting is sponsored by AMS, the Intelligent Systems and RIACS groups at NASA Ames, the National Science Foundation, and the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research at UCSC), and to provide additional details about it. The Workshop web site is www.ams.ucsc.edu/bayes03 (at present it does not contain much information beyond what's in this email, but it will evolve over the coming weeks). If you have questions about the Workshop that this message and/or the web site do not answer, please send an email message to [log in to unmask] ; the Organizing Committee for the Workshop is Thanasis Kottas <[log in to unmask]> Herbie Lee <[log in to unmask]> Raquel Prado <[log in to unmask]> Bruno Sanso (Chair, Organizing Committee) <[log in to unmask]> , and someone from this committee will read your message and respond to it quickly. The web site is not quite ready for electronic registration for the Workshop, but this will be ready in about a week; I'll write again later when it's ready, to encourage everyone who is interested in participating in the meeting in a contributed capacity to formally register. If you're interested in giving a contributed paper at this Workshop in a Valencia-style poster session, or if you're just interested in attending, we would welcome your participation. Attendance will be capped at about 100-120 people, and at present about 50 of these slots are taken, so there is plenty of room at the moment to join the Workshop -- if you were already planning to come to the JSM in San Francisco and you'd like to extend your stay in the Bay Area by a few days (or if you'd just like to come to Santa Cruz), to hear some outstanding talks and poster presentations on contemporary Bayesian data analysis in a beautiful setting (the UCSC campus is located in a 2,000 acre redwood forest overlooking Monterey Bay), please join us. A more extended description of the Workshop follows. Best wishes, and looking forward to seeing you in Santa Cruz, David Draper Description of the Workshop The focus of the Workshop will be Bayesian data analysis: starting with a real problem in science or decision-making, formulating the problem in statistical terms, using Bayesian methods to solve the original problem, and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the solution both statistically and substantively, with plenty of attention to the interplay between the real-world context and the Bayesian model-building, checking, and reformulating. The meeting will be held on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), immediately after the Joint Statistical Meetings that will take place from August 3-7 in nearby San Francisco. The goal is to bring together 100-120 people interested in Bayesian applications in a variety of disciplines, including (but not limited to) bioinformatics, biostatistics, econometrics, engineering, epidemiology, computer science, machine learning, and statistics. We hope that the setting of the UCSC campus, in a grove of redwood trees overlooking Monterey Bay, will create a fruitful atmosphere for multidisciplinary discussions and transfer of ideas. We expect invited sessions on at least the following topics: * Bioinformatics * Biostatistics/epidemiology * Computation * Engineering applications * Machine learning/computer science * Nonparametric and semiparametric methods * Spatiotemporal modeling The workshop is scheduled for 7-10 August 2003. The organization of the meeting will be as follows: * Participants will be encouraged to arrive on the evening of Thu 7 Aug to register and take part in an opening mixer; * There will be four invited sessions between 9am and 6pm on Fri 8 Aug; * Contributed papers will be presented in a Valencia-style poster session from 8pm onward on Fri 8 Aug; * There will be four invited sessions between 9am and 6pm on Sat 9 Aug; * The conference banquet will take place from 7.30pm onward on Sat 9 Aug; and * There will be an optional conference excursion to a winery in the Santa Cruz mountains on Sun 10 Aug. The workshop is intended for statisticians, scientists and engineers (from a wide variety of fields of specialization) involved in applications requiring statistical inference, prediction, and decision-making and using Bayesian methods. We expect the following approximate costs of participation in the Workshop: * The meeting will be residential on the UCSC campus, with most participants staying in apartments located within walking distance of the conference venue (you're of course free to stay off-campus if you wish); the approximate daily cost of room and board on-campus will be $100, and we encourage participants to arrive on Thu afternoon and depart on Sun afternoon. * The registration fee, which will cover the rental of the rooms where the talks and poster session will be held, the audiovisual equipment, and so on, will be approximately $100. * We will organize one or more buses to take participants from the JSM to Santa Cruz on Thu afternoon (this will be included in the registration fee); if you prefer to organize your own transport, the approximate cost from San Francisco or the San Francisco airport is $50 each way. * Costs of the optional events (the banquet on Sat night and the winery excursion on Sun) will be additional and have not yet been determined. Limited financial support is available and should be requested at time of registration (we expect to provide partial support to a substantial number of participants who are making contributed presentations). The (initial) registration deadline for the Workshop is 9 June 2003. As long as places are still available, registration will continue after this date up to and including the first day of the meeting, but after 9 June it may be more difficult for you to (a) have your contributed paper listed in the program and (b) receive full consideration for funding support. Participation in the workshop will be limited, and consideration will be given to program balance. Special consideration will be given to young investigators and Ph.D. students, and members of under-represented groups are especially encouraged to apply. Invited speakers (whose participation is confirmed) and possible topics for their talks name affiliation possible topic Jim Berger Duke and SAMSI applications in astronomy and (statistics) traffic engineering involving constraints in MCMC Bill Fitzgerald Cambridge (UK) x-ray crystallography, (engineering) changepoint detection, particle filters, communications, mixture models and classification Nando de Freitas UBC (Canada) machine learning, (computer science) computation, engineering applications Alan Gelfand Duke (statistics) applied spatio-temporal problems David Haussler UCSC (biomolecular bioinformatics engineering) David Higdon Los Alamos (statistics) integration of field data and computer simulations for calibration and prediction John Huelsenbeck UC San Diego (biology) bioinformatics Gabriel Huerta New Mexico (statistics) spatio-temporal modeling, computation Lurdes Inoue Washington biostatistics/epidemiology (biostatistics) J. R. Lockwood RAND (statistics) Bayesian methods for modeling water quality in U.S. drinking water supplies, with particular emphasis on multivariate methods that are necessary to transforming the existing regulatory framework Viridiana Lourdes ITAM (Mexico) survival models, volatility (statistics) models Steve MacEachern Ohio State (statistics) semiparametric methods Marc Mangel UCSC (applied math applications in ecology and statistics) Xiao-Li Meng Harvard (statistics) a Bayesian framework for measuring the loss of information due to incomplete data in genetic hypothesis testing Kerrie Mengersen Newcastle (Australia) case study in public health: (statistics) adjusted likelihood for synthesising empirical evidence from studies that differ in quality and design: effects of environmental tobacco smoke Peter Mueller MD Anderson Cancer sample size determination Center (biostatistics) for microarray experiments, Bayesian mixture modeling for differential gene expression, dose individualization Jennifer Pittman Duke (statistics) use of Bayesian tree models with both clinical and genomic information for cancer prediction Fernando Quintana PUC (Chile) nonparametric Bayesian (statistics) modeling for multivariate ordinal data, optimal design for repeated binary data, outlier detection via clustering Sylvia Richardson Imperial College (UK) analysis of gene expression (epidemiology) data using Bayesian hierarchical models, spatial modeling in epidemiology David Cambridge (UK) health-care performance Spiegelhalter (biostatistics) indicators and issues of risk-adjustment, sequential monitoring, multiple comparisons, false discovery rates, etc.; possible tie-in with dynamic Harrison-West- type models, and Bayesian model criticism Michael Stein Chicago (statistics) spatiotemporal covariance functions Marina Vannucci Texas A&M (statistics) Bayesian variable selection, wavelet-based feature selection, and linear models with many variables, with applications in chemometrics, nutrition and bioinformatics Brani Vidakovic Georgia Tech Bayesian estimation of (statistics) log-spectral density, Bayesian block wavelet shrinkage, robust Bayes (Gamma-Minimax) wavelet shrinkage Chris Wikle Missouri (statistics) spatio-temporal dynamical models with application to either atmospheric science, oceanography, or ecology Santa Cruz and UCSC By virtue of (a) its spectacular setting, nestled within 2,000 acres of redwood forest and meadows overlooking the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary of California's beautiful Central Coast, (b) its award-winning architecture, and (c) its network of picturesque bikeways and pathways, the University of California, Santa Cruz is considered one of the most visually appealing campuses in the world. It's located about 70 miles (115 km) south of San Francisco and 30 miles (50 km) from Silicon Valley, at the north end of Monterey Bay, with the Monterey-Carmel peninsula at the south end of the bay about 40 miles (65 km) away. Santa Cruz itself (population around 50,000) is a beach resort close to some of the most stunning redwood groves in the U.S. The weather in the summer usually features bright but mild sunny days with a bit of coastal marine fog burning off by late morning; the maximum daily temperature in August is usually in the 70-79 degrees F range (21-27 degrees C), although days in the mid-80s F (about 29 degrees C) are not impossible, and the low temperature at night is typically about 15-20 degrees F (8-11 degrees C) below the daily max (rainfall in August is rare). UCSC was founded in 1965 with two goals: excellence in research in the sciences, and innovation in undergraduate education. Among other subjects, UCSC has nationally and internationally recognized research programs in astronomy, astrophysics, bioinformatics, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, machine learning, and ocean sciences. The Baskin School of Engineering, in which the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics (AMS) resides, was created in 1997 and strives for research and teaching excellence in biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology. AMS began in 2001 with following main goal: the creation of centers of national and international excellence in Bayesian statistics and in applied mathematical modeling of complex dynamical systems. Further information about UCSC is available at www.ucsc.edu/ ; maps of various kinds are available at maps.ucsc.edu/ . Additional details on the Baskin School of Engineering and AMS may be found at www.soe.ucsc.edu/ and www.ams.ucsc.edu/ . ============================================================================== Professor David Draper Chair, Department of Applied Mathematics web http://www.ams.ucsc.edu/~draper/ and Statistics email [log in to unmask] Baskin School of phone US (831) 459 1295, nonUS +1 831 459 1295 Engineering fax US (831) 459 4829, nonUS +1 831 459 4829 University of California 1156 High Street departmental web pages www.ams.ucsc.edu Santa Cruz CA 95064 USA Interesting quotes, number 24 in a series: The end is in the beginning; and yet you go on. -- Samuel Beckett ============================================================================== ------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is for discussion of modelling issues and the BUGS software. 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