StanCon 2020. August 11-14 at Oregon State University. Registration is now open!

Announcements
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Please see the latest announcement here: https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stancon-2020-going-virtual

The following post is out-of-date.

StanCon 2020 will be at Oregon State University!

There will be two days of tutorials followed by two days of talks, open discussions, and statistical modeling. Up-to-date details at https://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2020

Dates

August 11-14, 2020.

  • Tutorials:

    Tuesday and Wednesday, August 11-12, 2020.

  • Conference:

    Thursday and Friday, August 13-14, 2020.

Location

Oregon State University

Learning Innovation Center

2750 SW Campus Way, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA

Registration and Submission

Details will be announced soon.

Call for Volunteers

We’re looking for help! If you’d like to:

  • be part of the scientific committee to review submissions
  • organize tutorials and sessions
  • promote StanCon by reaching out to different communities
  • artwork, event planning, or a slew of other things

Please email stancon@mc-stan.org! We ask all volunteers follow the StanCon code of conduct.

Tutorials, Sessions, Contributed Talks

We’re still working out the schedule for tutorials, sessions, and contributed talks. Once we have details, we’ll make a request for proposals. For those that plan early:

  • Tutorials: we’re seeking proposals for half-day or full-day tutorials. These can either be focused on foundations of Stan programming and Bayesian inference or advanced topics that can be for a niche audience. Proposals must describe the content and objectives of the tutorial.

  • Sessions: we’re seeking proposals for thematic sessions. Sessions run in parallel on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. Sessions will be 5 talks. Proposals must describe the theme, content, and a list of potential speakers.

  • Contributed talks: if you’d like to present your work at StanCon 2020, we’re looking for people to talk either in the general session or in one of the parallel sessions.

Full details on what, how, and when to submit will be available shortly. If you have any questions or are considering submitting a proposal, feel free to reach out early at stancon@mc-stan.org

Sponsorship

We can’t do this without the support of generous sponsors that support our events! If you’re interested in sponsoring StanCon, please email stancon@mc-stan.org.

Organizers

  • Susana Marquez @Susana_Marquez (The Rockefeller Foundation).
  • Eric J Ward (University of Washington & NOAA)
  • Debashis Mondal. Statistics Department. Oregon State University.
  • Yi Zhang. @yizhang Metrum Research Group.
  • Daniel Lee. @syclik Generable.

If you’re interested in being part of the organizing team, please email stancon@mc-stan.org.

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Thanks so much for organizing this!

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Why in the USA?!?!?!?!?! :( :( I don’t have a Visa! :( :( :( :(

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I’d be interested in presenting about the emacs stan-mode (https://github.com/stan-dev/stan-mode), but that’s too narrow. If we can gather several stan programming environment developers (VS Code, Vim, etc?), that may be a session.

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Great pleasure to have Eric Ward and @Susana_Marquez join in StanCon 2020 organization committee!

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The Stan Governing Body didn’t want three in a row in Europe. They need to find local organizers and I believe the only proposals were for Corvallis, Oregon in the U.S. and Utrecht in The Netherlands. (I’m not on the SGB and only see the reports here like everyone else.)

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I’m by no means a methods researcher and especially not in bayesian inference. But I’m developing an analysis method to analyze industrial ANOVA style experiments with time-dependent nature under the framework of multilevel models using {brms}. I haven’t seen any literature/case studies analyzing these experiments in this way.

But I’m not sure if stancon is the appropriate place for methods that will probably never become a published paper. Would something like this be appropriate for submitting a short talk? (<10 minutes).

Thanks!

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It definitely sounds appropriate. Good luck with that work!

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That certainly sounds like something stan users would be interested in. We’ll announce registration and submission details soon.

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Thank you @mcol and @yizhang !

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StanCon is one of the least intimidating places to present on applied statistics. I mean, @Bob_Carpenter has an entire case study on modeling baseball statistics. So you really can present just about anything with Stan in it.

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We try very hard to keep the tone of these forums, conferences, etc. constructive.

@andrewgelman has a case study on golf putting (with a super cool non-linear model). And @imadmali as one on basketball (with super cool animations).

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I agree StanCon is a great forum (obviously :-) ), but to me sports are almost the prototypical overused domain in statistics. So to underscore that you can definitely present anything, we’ve already had great presentations involving

cell metabolism, HIV prevalence, clinical trials, galaxy clusters, neutrino mass, drug dynamics, cocoa beans, gas consumption, fairness, police statistics, communicating statistical results and much more.

And we would love to see more topics, so if your work involves statistics in the context of knitting, art, video games, psychological models, ecology, construction, classical music, plush toys, handshaking, the Internet, philosophy, ethics, transcendental experiences, community building, governance, child play, dreams, dragons, unicorns or literally anything else, consider presenting your work!

To me the best part of StanCon is learning how people in hugely different background from mine approach problems that have some connection to my work.

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StanCon 2020 registration is now open!

Please find details on tutorials proposals, thematic session proposals, and talk proposals at https://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2020/#tutorials.

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Would you all consider having a session on “open problems” where folks from different disciplines can present mini-presentations or posters on problems that they think would benefit from a Bayesian approach (and try to inspire interest)? @charlesm93 and I were talking about how this might be a nice thing to add…

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I like the idea. Potentially can be a piggyback of the poster session. Could you email stancon@mc-stan.org for a better coordinated discussion? Not every organizer is active on discourse.

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Sure thing! I’ll loop Charles in too.

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This is similar to a proposal I sent to @syclik a while ago. My focus was slightly different, but I think your take has also a lot of value. There probably is a best of both worlds approach somewhere. Here’s my version, will be happy to help get this off the ground in any form:

Problem solving session: people can submit a new type of submission a “Problem statement”, describing a problem they are (unsuccessfully) trying to solve and why it is important. During the actual session, participants form small groups around the individual problems (15 people max), the submitter presents a short description of the problem and the group then spends some time in a structured (facilitated) discussion, trying to chart possible lines of attacking the problem.

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This is a great idea for both posters and as a Thematic session proposal. If you gather a few folks/topics we can start adding information in case other people are interested having a joint session.

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