News and Announcements

1. May 12, 2008 - The ISBA Bylaws were amended with the addition of a new Bylaw section E 3 establishing the Constitution and Bylaws Committee. Initial committee membership is listed on the ISBA Committees and Appointments webpage.
2. May 10, 2008 - Several Satellite workshops have been announced just before or just after the ISBA 2008 9^th ISBA World Meeting, 21st-25th July 2008 on Hamilton Island, Australia. Pre-conference workshops include an Environmetrics Workshop at QUT in Brisbane, the (free!) Monash Bayesian Econometrics Workshop in Melborune, and Workshops on Hamilton Island on Spatial Modelling and on the Bayesian Core; post-coverence Workshops include one on Complex Computer Models at Macquarie University in Sidney. A few short-courses are also planned; see here for details about all of these.
3. March 12, 2008 - NSF travel funding has been made available several for young (<7 years since Ph.D.) US investigators to attend the upcoming ISBA '08 World Meeting.
4. January 26, 2008 - Bayesian Biostatistics Conference. The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center's Division of Quantitative Science is presenting a three-day conference BB08 on Jan 30 - Feb 1 2008 in Houston, TX, chaired by ISBA members Donald A. Berry and Telba Z. Irony.
5. December 18, 2007 - New Membership Partnership with IMS. The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and ISBA are pleased to announce that ISBA members can join (or renew) with IMS at 25% off the regular IMS dues rate, and that IMS members can join (or renew) with ISBA at 25% off the regular ISBA dues rate. For example, ISBA members pay US$71 for a year's IMS membership. For all the IMS dues and subscription prices for individual members, see the IMS or (soon) ISBA join/renewal pages.
6. November 16, 2007 - The ISBA Election is complete! Election Winners are lised on-line for the positions of President-Elect and Treasurer, and four new members of the Board of Directors. Candidate statements are available on-line.
7. October 18, 2007 - Nominations are now open for the 2007 DeGroot Prize for an outstanding book on statistical science. Nominations close on December 15, 2007.
8. October 1, 2007 - ISBA at JSM. Next year's U.S. Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2008) August 3-7 2008 in Denver, CO will feature invited session 203172, The Role of Priors in Bayesian Analysis of Complex Real-world Problems. Thanks and congratulations to the ISBA Program Council for their work in winning the competition for invited sessions.
9. September 21, 2007 - Nominations are now open for the 2007 Mitchell Prize for an outstanding refereed paper that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem.
10. September 9, 2007 - Nominations are now open for the 2007 Savage Awards for outstanding doctoral dissertations employing or developing Bayesian methods.
11. August 27, 2007 - 2007 ISBA Election Slate was announced by the Nominations Committee, headed (as per our bylaw D) by Past-President Alan Gelfand. The candidate list has personal statements by the candidates for President, Treasurer, and four openings on the Board of Directors. Congratulations and thanks to all, and thanks for your service!
12. August 21, 2007 - New ISBA Bulletin Editor Congratulations and thanks to Raphael Gottardo, new editor of the quarterly ISBA Bulletin. There are still some openings for Associate Editors; email Raph to express interest, or to pass along suggestions or tell him about any ISBA news items. Thanks to departing editor J. Andrés Christen for his years of service (2005-2007).
13. August 16, 2007 - ISBA Prize Committee Empaneled.  A recent change to ISBA's bylaws has created a single Prize Committee to appoint selection panels for all of ISBA's major awards-- the DeGroot Prize, Lindley Prize, Mitchell Prize, and Savage Award. The first Prize Committee consists of Susie Bayarri (chair), Ed George, Chris Carter, Phil Dawid, Fernando Quintana and Marina Vannucci. Congratulations and thanks to all!
14. July 31, 2007 - 2006 Savage Awards Announced.  The 2006 Savage Award Committee (Dipak Dey, Katja Ickstadt, and Peter Müller, chair) announced the winners of the Savage Awards for Bayesian Ph.D. dissertations nominated in calendar year 2006. The two winners and two runners-up all gave invited presentations of their work at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City in a featured session chaired by Alan Gelfand. The committee reports that "Between the finalists the vote was very close. We were very close to splitting the prize. But then, all 4 finalists have already won the important prize, i.e., the opportunity to present in the special featured Savage session at JSM"

    The winners were:

    • Theory & Methods
      Surya Tokdar, Exploring Dirichlet Mixture and Logistic Gaussian Process Priors in Density Estimation, Regression and Sufficient Dimension Reduction. Purdue Univ, J.K. Ghosh.
      Pierpaolo de Blasi (Honorable Mention), Semiparametric models in Bayesian Event History Analysis. Bocconi U; Nils Lid Hjort & Pietro Muliere.
      
    • Applied Methodology
      Robert Gramacy, Bayesian Treed Gaussian Process Models. UCSC, Herbie Lee.
      Carlos Carvalho (Honorable Mention), Structure and Sparsity in High-Dimensional Multivariate Analysis. Duke Univ, Mike West.
      
    Congratulations to all!
15. July 10, 2007 - New ISBA Website.  The ISBA website has been redesigned (thanks to Peter Green and Robert Wolpert!) and is now hosted at Duke University (thanks to the newly-renamed Duke Department of Statistical Science, nee ISDS). Thanks too to Mike Evans and the Department of Statistics at Toronto University for a decade of hosting and managing the ISBA website.

    Comments, corrections and suggestions about the new website are welcome--- every page has a 'webmaster' link at the bottom for feedback.

16. May 3, 2007 - Soliciting Contributions for ISBA Fund in Honor of Pilar Iglesias.  As you probably know, Pilar Iglesias, who organized the superb ISBA World Meeting at Vina del Mar, Chile in 2004, recently passed away. Pilar was a research leader in Latin America in the areas of Bayesian theory and analysis and an outstanding educator. She contributed to the profession through service in ISBA and in the Chilean Statistical Association and was a dedicated mentor of students and young researchers.

    A fund in memory of Pilar has now been established by ISBA. The goal is to raise $20,000 to endow an award in her name, to be given in perpetuity. The award would provide travel grants for one or two graduate students or young researchers from a developing nation so that they can participate in an ISBA World Meeting or a Valencia meeting. The funds will be managed by ISBA. The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Pilar's home institution, provided the initial $5,000 to the fund.

    We ask that you consider making a contribution to the fund. Any amount, even if small, will help ISBA reach its goal. To make a contribution please visit the web site http://www.ams.ucsc.edu/~bruno/cgi-bin/iglesias.cgi. Using the secure online system is strongly encouraged. We thank you in advance,
    Alicia Carriquiry
    Jay Kadane
    Fabrizio Ruggeri
    Peter Green, President, ISBA

17. October 25, 2006 - ISBA 2008 9^th ISBA World Meeting, 21st-25th July 2008  You are warmly invited to join us for the conference of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA), to be held on Hamilton Island Australia in 2008. The ISBA conferences are held every two years, with every second one held jointly with the Valencia meetings. These conferences have become one of the premier events in Bayesian statistics. ISBA 2008 will broadly follow the tradition of these meetings, combining an excellent scientific program that embraces all things Bayesian with opportunities to explore a beautiful location with old and new friends. Please join us!

    Some conference information is now available at the website below, with additional details being posted to the site as information becomes available

    ISBA 2008 web page: http://www.isba2008.sci.qut.edu.au/
    and all email correspondence in relation to this event should be sent to the organising committee isba08@qut.edu.au