In response to the call from the 2021 IMS Survey report to expand membership from emerging areas of data science, underrepresented groups and from regions outside of North America, the IMS Council has just approved the launch of annual IMS International Conference on Statistics and Data Science (ICSDS).T

he first 2022 IMS International Conference on Statistics and Data Science (ICSDS) will be a four-day conference to be held in Florence, Italy in December 2022, organized by IMS with the collaboration of The Florence center for Data Science and the Department of Statistics, Computer Science, Application of the University of Florence.

Its objective is to bring together researchers in statistics and data science from academia, industry and government in a stimulating environment to exchange ideas on the developments of modern statistics, machine learning theory, methods and applications in data science. The conference will consist of several plenary sessions, and about 50 invited, contributed and poster sessions; with a portion of invited sessions designated for young researchers. The expected size of the conference is 300-400 participants. The conference will present topics with broad appeal, including: deep learning, causal inference, precision medicine, unsupervised, semi-supervised and supervised learning, nonparametrics, Bayesian statistics, environment statistics, network and graphic models, recommender systems, bioinformatics, high-dimensional data, functional data, genomics, drug discovery, statistics computations, imaging, intrusion and fraud detection, etc.