Dear ICSA Members and Friends,
First I hope that you and your family stay safe and healthy. The year 2020 is a special and challenging year. It is dreadful given what has been caused by COVID-19 but also good in the sense that it has been teaching us a lot. During this unprecedented time period, I believe that we should and can keep connected and work even harder and together to contribute what we can to fight COVID-19 and also make our ICSA stronger.
Before the start of this year, I was thinking what should be the focus of ICSA for the coming year and one thing came to my mind is the promotion of the association and the recruiting of new members, especially students and young statisticians. While thinking about this and also talking to some friends, a question always came up and it is what are the reasons to join a professional society given today’s technology. Clearly, the traditional way such as getting information or accessing a journal is no longer exclusive to society members and this is probably true to all societies. To me, joining ICSA has to be wanting to be staying connected and belonging to a big family. Of course, as an old saying, only united and together can make differences.
ICSA meetings have been a major way for us to come together and exchange ideas, but this year our traditions are facing challenges. ICSA has been following and watching the COVID-19 situations closely. Unfortunately we have decided to cancel our 2020 China Conference which was scheduled to be held at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China during June 26 – 29, 2020. A great deal of effort and work, from both ICSA side and local side, had been put into it before its cancelation and among others, I especially want to thank the Program Co-Chairs Drs. Ying Zhang and Hui Zhao, who had organized an excellent program, and the Local Organizing Committee Chairs, Drs. Hu Zhang and Qinglong Yang, who had planned and booked almost everything needed for a great conference. Also we have to postpone our 2020 Applied Statistics Symposium from May to December 13 – 16, 2020 at the same location and for this, I wish to thank Dr. Hulin Wu, the meeting’s Executive Committee Chair, and many people in various committees for their diligent and hard working. This change has made the planning of a great conference even harder and can only be possible by their committees’ extra time and effort.
While working on and waiting for our symposium in December, the work for 2021 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium and China Conference have been under way. The 2021 ICSA Symposium will be held at Washington DC and although the specific time and location cannot be decided at this moment because of COVID-19, Dr. Guoqing Diao along with others has been working hard on these as well as organizing the scientific program. The 2021 ICSA China Conference will be held at Xian University of Finance and Economics, Xian, China during July 2 – 5, 2021 and among others, Drs. Yingying Fan and Chunjie Wang, the Program Committee Co-Chairs, have started to work on the scientific program. I am very sure that they and the committee members will put up an excellent program. In the meantime, Dr. Zhezhen Jin, the Chair of ICSA Program Committee, and his committee members are working hard too for other ICSA conferences in the near future and I encourage everyone to contact Dr. Jin if you have any suggestions.
Although we cannot go to the front line to fight COVID-19 as medical doctors and health care workers, we as statisticians can make our contributions to this fight too no matter working at home or still at working places. I am very glad to see that many of our members in all fields, including academia, governments and industry, have been doing cutting-edge and timely work. To pick a couple of examples, Dr. Xihong Lin from Harvard University along with her collaborators has developed an app that uses the community’s help to track and fight COVID-19. Dr. Jun Yan from the University of Connecticut and Dr. Hao Helen Zhang from the University of Arizona are currently organizing a Webinar Series: Data Science in Action in Response to the Outbreak of COVID-19 and many of our members actively participate in it. I know that many other members across all fields working directly or indirectly to find a cure/prevention, volunteer their time/experience, or donate to help others to combat this pandemic. I applaud their quick actions and significant contributions and hope that everyone of us can make some contributions in our own ways.
To conclude, I like to give my salute to all people such as health workers who are at the front line fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic and also wish to thank all of ICSA members and friends for your support and participation of ICSA activities and for being stay in connected with each other. I hope that we all will continue to stay connected in our big ICSA family and think of others as well as making our contributions to this fight against COVID-19. I truly believe that our association will get better, bigger and stronger and each of you will get better too. Please keep you and your family members safe and healthy and look forward to the near future when we can greet and work with each other face to face.
Jianguo (Tony) Sun
ICSA 2020 President
Professor of Statistics
University of Missouri