The Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has been hosting the International Conference on Advances in Interdisciplinary Statistics and Combinatorics (AISC), a biennial event, since 2007.
AISC 2018 was held at the Elliot University Center during October 5-7, 2018. John Z. Kiss, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, inaugurated the conference. The conference featured a total of 32 sessions and 122 talks including 8 plenary talks and more than 25 talks by students. Barry Nussbaum, American Statistical Association (ASA) President 2017, was the keynote speaker. His talk was titled, “It’s Not What We Said, It’s Not What They Heard, It’s What They Say They Heard”. Other plenary speakers were David Banks (Duke & SAMSI), David Dickey & Sujit Ghosh (North Carolina State), Maria Ivette Gomes (University of Lisbon), Javier Rojo (Oregon State University) and Christopher Nachtsheim (University of Minnesota). The symposium on Design of Experiments, co-organized by John Stufken (Arizona State University) and Abhyuday Mandal (University of Georgia) attracted the largest number of speakers.
The best paper presentation competition for graduate students was won by Joshua Lukemire (Emory University) with Bin Luo and Austin Lawson (UNC Greensboro) finishing second and third respectively. The top three winners among the undergraduate students were Austin Miller (University of Wyoming), Amber Young (Purdue University) and Yiwen Tang (Wake Forest University). These student winners were honored at the conference banquet that took place on the evening of October 6. Five senior North Carolina statisticians who have made outstanding contributions for the promotion of statistics in North Carolina or for making significant contributions for the North Carolina Chapter of the ASA were also honored at the banquet. These included David Banks (Duke and SAMSI), David Dickey and Sujit Ghosh (North Carolina State), Maura Stokes (SAS) and Breda Munoz (RTI International). Current NC-ASA President Elizabeth Mannshardt introduced the honorees.
The conference received sponsorship from The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), the American Statistical Association (ASA), the North Carolina Chapter of the American Statistical Association (NC-ASA), the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS), RHO, Springer and Pearson.
Thank you to Sat Gupta, (UNC Greensboro), for the details in this story.