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Created: 19 May 2019

Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award 2020

The Bernoulli Society welcomes applications to the New Researcher Award 2020. Each awardee shall deliver a talk at a special invited session during the World Congress in Probability and Statistics 2020, and will receive a funding up to 1000€ to offset travel and other expenses. Bernoulli News will publish their pictures and a paragraph about their work.

Eligible candidates are active researchers in Probability Theory who obtained the PhD degree on or after Jan 1st 2014 and who are regular members of the Bernoulli Society. Female candidates get 1 extra year for each child born since receiving the PhD.

Candidates should apply through the web form https://goo.gl/forms/v8zDJaFUKj5IGEG73 and send the required documents to the e-mail address indicated there.

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Created: 10 September 2013

The 2015 ISI World Statistics Congress (WSC) will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the period July 27-31, 2015. The Bernoulli Society is soliciting invited paper session (IPS) proposals for the Rio WSC scientific program.

All proposals should be sent to:

Professor Byeong U. Park, The Bernoulli Society Representative for the Rio WSC scientific program, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The deadline for submission of IPS proposals is October 4, 2013

The proposal should include:

[1] Name, affiliation, contact email address of the proposer;

[2] Name, affiliation, contact email address of the organizer (if different from the proposer);

[3] Title, description and justification of the proposal

The Bernoulli Society aims at striking a proper balance between statistics and probability in organizing IPS sessions. All proposals will be evaluated and selected by the Bernoulli Society Representative, based on importance of theme and possibility of attracting general audience. If selected, the proposers will be asked to complete their proposals by listing proposed speakers, their affiliations and (tentative) titles of their talks. There will be not much time between the selection of the proposals and the completion of the selected proposals because of a tight schedule. We expect that the successful proposers can have only 5 weeks to complete the selected proposals. Thus, it is advised to think of possible speakers and contact them in advance. The completed proposals will be sent to WSC Scientific Program Committee (SPC) by December 1, 2013, for further evaluation and final selection. The final selection by the WSC-SPC will be based on quality and diversity. Note that ISI is keen for proposals with diversity in region. Proposals with speakers in a single continent will be given a low priority. The Bernoulli Society aims at diversity in age and gender as well. It is suggested to include promising young or women speakers if at all possible.

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Created: 10 May 2012

SUMMARY OF THE SPA SPONSORSHIP AGREEMENT BETWEEN BERNOULLI SOCIETY AND ELSEVIER

REFERENCE DATE: May 8, 2012

Elsevier owns and publishes Stochastic Processes and Their Applications (SPA).  SPA is designated as an official journal of the Bernoulli Society. During the SPA conference in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2011 the Bernoulli Society and Elsevier extended the term of the contractual concerning SPA that extends until March 2015.

The society had expressed its concerns about the about the price of the journal. Elsevier understood these concerns and agreed to reduce the price very considerably over the next few years. The price issue is slightly complicated, so some background information is needed. SPA presently has two different institutional subscription prices, the so-called "full" and "alternative subscription'' price, that correspond to the ``standard institutional'' and ``alternative institutional'' subscriptions, respectively.  The alternative subscription price is substantially lower than the full price, and is advertised prominently at the SPA website.  Any library can order the alternative subscription, which gives full electronic access, while the printed journal is received quarterly rather than monthly.  To our best knowledge, all published comparisons of journal prices have used the high full price rather than the much lower alternative.

Concerning the price of SPA, Elsevier shared our concerns and have already reduced the main institutional price.  They have further agreed that during the course of the agreement, the journal will align to one advertised institutional subscription price that will be closer to the lower of the two current subscription prices.  This will be achieved by reducing the higher institutional subscription rate by the equivalent of at least 10 per cent per annum through 2014 - at the end of which the Alternative Institutional Subscription price will no longer be advertised.

Another concern addressed in the negotiations was Open Access.  Free online access has been offered on SPA, back to Volume 1, Issue 1, for Bernoulli Society members, for some years.   It has been further agreed that SPA will have delayed Open Access, i.e. each article becomes freely available four years after publication to all comers, back to 1995 under the Open Archives initiative.  (This initiative, effective for all articles published from 2008 onwards, involves no charges or other costs to the authors.) Also, Elsevier accepts that authors deposit to ArXiv preprints of the final accepted version of their SPA-papers including all editorial changes.  In fact, the editors encourage all SPA authors to do so. The difference with the practice of IMS published journals is that SPA authors have to upload their papers themselves.

Among the benefits for the Bernoulli Society from the contract is that Elsevier sponsors the annual SPA lecture at the SPA-conference or at the World Congress, and the Ito prize that is given every two years for the best paper published in SPA, over the corresponding period, in addition to other special sessions at conferences in probability and statistics. Moreover, Elsevier annually sponsors 2-4 travel awards to Bernoulli Society conferences, especially for young researchers.

It was agreed to reduce the full price by at least 10% annually. In fact, the full price of SPA was reduced by 15 per cent from 2011 to 2012. Specifically, the full price ($ denoting USD) developed as follows in the years 2010-2012:

2010      2011      2012

$2858     $2572   $2189

The full price of SPA is accordingly projected to decrease to $1773 by 2014.

If the number of printed pages is assumed to equal 3200 (the average number in the period 2009-2011), the price per page will decrease as follows:

2012    2013    2014

$0.68    $0.62    $0.55

The alternative subscription price in 2012 is $1550, corresponding to a price per page of  $0.48.

It is of interest to compare these prices to prices of other journals.  2008 prices per page can be calculated from an AMS survey of journal prices (http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/journal-survey.pdf).

Here are some examples of probability journals:

Probability Theory and Related Fields:  $0.77/page

Stochastic Analysis and Applications:  $1.62/page

Annals of Applied Probability:             $0.11/page

Annals of Probability:                          $0.12/page

Bernoulli:                                           $0.19/page (significantly lower than reported in AMS survey)

The last three journals are published by societies and are therefore lower. One reason is that journals published by societies are usually subsidized in some way. For instance, editors-in-chief for society-sponsored journals are generally not financially supported to offset the time commitment outside normally expected duties of academic and other regular employers.

Comparison to the commercial publication Probability Theory and Related Fields by Springer-Verlag is particularly relevant for perspective. In 2012 the price of PTRF is $1513.  If the number of pages is as in 2008, then this corresponds to $0.80/page.

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Created: 02 May 2011

 Probability and statistics are undergoing a substantial increase in both the breadth of scope and the mathematical technicality of many areas of specialization. There is a need for expertly written survey articles that will communicate an historic perspective on the successes, failures and general health of the area, as well as provide young researchers with a point of entry to the frontiers of the field. The Bernoulli Society plays a role in recognizing and communicating the importance of such scholarly efforts through a special award.

 The Bernoulli Prize for an Outstanding Survey Article is to recognize authors of an influential survey publication in the areas of probability and mathematical statistics, respectively. The paper should be timely in addressing areas of active or emerging importance, but have been in circulation long enough for there to be evidence of its impact.

The award consists of the prize amount of 1000€ together with an award certificate. The combined awards are biennial, starting with a paper in probability and presented in a formal ceremony at the Bernoulli World Congress (BWC) in the summer of 2012, and a prize for a paper in mathematical statistics is awarded in 2014, and formally presented at the ISI Statistics World Congress (SWC) in the summer of 2015, and each so awarded every four years, thereafter.

The Committee for the Bernoulli Prize for an Outstanding Survey Article in Probability has been formed as follows: David Aldous (Chair), Alain-Sol Sznitman, Nina Gantert.

Call for nominations in probability

According to the award specifications, nominations exclude self-nominations, and can otherwise be submitted to the committee chair David Aldous This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Nominations should include full name and email address of both the nominee and nominator, as well as a pdf file of the published article in probability.  Nominations should be submitted by November 30, 2011.

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Created: 20 October 2010

The increase in both the  breadth and the mathematical technicality of many areas of specialization in probability and statistics can be mitigated by expertly written survey articles that will communicate an historic perspective on the successes, failures, and general health of important areas, as well as provide young researchers with a point of entry to the frontiers of a given field.  To acknowledge the general importance of such efforts, The Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability is pleased to announce the establishment of ``The Bernoulli Prize for an Outstanding Survey Article in Probability or Mathematical Statistics''.

 A prize of 1000€ and official certificate will be awarded biennially, alternating between the respective areas of mathematical statistics and probability.   Awards will be made by recommendations of a prize committee appointed by Bernoulli Council,  based on nominations solicited by the prize committee from the general membership.  Look for future calls for nominations in Bernoulli Newsletter, Bernoulli E-Briefs, ISI Newsletter, and on Bernoulli and ISI web sites.

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Created: 04 October 2010

The Committee for Conferences on Stochastic Processes is pleased to announce the approval by the Bernoulli Society Council of a new prize. The prize is to honour the scientific work of Wolfgang Doeblin and to recognize and promote outstanding work by researchers at the beginning of their mathematical careers in the field of Probability.

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Wolfgang Doeblin was born in Berlin in 1915. His family, of Jewish origin, were forced into exile and settled in Paris, where Doeblin attended the Sorbonne. From 1935, when he began work on Markov chains under Fréchet, until his death in 1940, he was occupied whenever he was able with research in Probability. In this short time he made many deep and original contributions.

From 1938, he served in the French Army and was stationed in defence of the German invasion, which came in May 1940. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for an action under enemy fire, to restore communications to his unit. Facing capture in June 1940, he took his own life.

Until the invasion, Doeblin had continued to work on mathematics. In February 1940 he sent to the Académie des Sciences de Paris a pli cacheté entitled Sur l'équation do Kolmogoroff. When finally in the year 2000 it was opened, it showed that he had understood many important ideas of modern Probability, including the potential crucial role of martingales.

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The Wolfgang Doeblin Prize will be awarded for the first time in 2012 at the World Congress of the Bernoulli Society in Istanbul, and afterwards every two years.

It will be awarded to a single individual for work in the field of Probability, and who is at the beginning of his or her mathematical career.

The Wolfgang Doeblin Prize is generously supported by Springer. The awardee will be invited to submit to the journal Probability Theory and Related Fields a paper for publication as the Wolfgang Doeblin Prize Article, and will also be invited to present a Doeblin Prize Lecture in a later Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications or Bernoulli Society Congress.

James Norris Chair,
Committee for Conferences on Stochastic Processes

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Created: 21 June 2010

Vidmantas Kastytis Bentkus, the head of the Mathematical Statistics Department in the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius, died on  June 3, 2010 from a heart attack. 

Vidmantas Kastytis Bentkus was born in Šilute (Lithuania) in 1949. In 1967-1970 he was a student of the Mathematical department at the Vilnius University; in 1970-1976 a student of the Mathematical- Mechanical Department at Moscow State Lomonosov University. In 1977 he received a doctor's degree from the Moscow University. In 1986 received the Habilitated Doctor of Sciences degree from Vilnius University. He was working at Mathematical Statistic Department of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics as a principal research associate.

Vidmantas’ research interests and achievements were impressive. He started his scientific carrier in the area of functional analysis and infinite dimensional partial differential equations and latter moved to the area of limit theorems of mathematical statistics and probability theory. The last 10-15 years he was working on finding an optimal and most precise form of inequalities for sums of independent random variables. He is an author or a coauthor of more than 90 scientific papers published in most prestigious science journals worldwide.

In 1987 and 1999  he was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize of Science. In 1990-1991 he was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung in Germany.

 

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Created: 27 May 2010

Bernoulli Society organized the following 13 Invited Paper Meetings (IPM) in several topics of mathematical statistics, probability and of their applications.

One of the IPMs was an ISI-BS Tribute Session to David G. Kendall. In this commemoration David Kendall was remembered as being heavily involved in the formation of the Bernoulli Society and for contacting in 1974 a member of the Bernoulli family to request to allow the society the use of elements of the Bernoulli family´s coat of arms. This celebration also included talks on the perspective of David Kendall pioneering works on stochastic geometry and its applications, and the statistical theory of shape.

The BS representative in the ISI Programme Co-coordinating Committee was Ursula Gather.

MONDAY AUGUST 17

IPM 13 Stochastics of Genoma

Organizer and Chair: Jun Liu

• Inferring Coancestry of Genome Segments in Populations, Elizabeth Thompson
• A Bayesian Approach to RNAi Data Analysis, I-Shou Chang, Chung-Hsin Chen, Chin-YU Chen, Chao Hsiung
• Transcription initiation bias in disease states, Winston Hide, Christopher Maher, Oliver Hofmann

IPM 14 Complex Data Analysis, Dimension Reduction and Sparsity

Organizer and Chair: Ursula Gather

• Detection of an Abnormal Cluster in a Network , Ery Arias-Castro
• Model Free Variable Selection when p is much Larger than n, Lixing Zhu, Liping Zhu

Discussant: Hannes Leeb

IPM 26 Functional Data Analysis: Theory and Applications

(Jointly organized with the International Association for Statistical Computing)
Organizer and Chair: Jason Fine

• Functional Data Analysis for Hazard Rates, Jeng-Min Chiou, Hans-Georg Mueller
• Dantzig Selector for Censored Linear Regression Models, Yi Li
• Functional Linear Regression of Gradients from Sparse Data, Ian Mckeague, Sara Lopez-Pintado

Discussant: Ingrid van Kielegom

TUESDAY, 18 AUGUST

IPM 12 Statistics in Biodiversity

Organizer and Chair: Miguel Nakamura

• Site Occupancy Models and Inference Using Single and Multiple Surveys, Subhash Lele
• Statistical Estimation of Biodiversity Indices, Anne Chao

Discussant: Abdel El-Shaarawi

IPM 73 Relative Survival

(Jointly organized with the General Topics and Local Scientific Committees)
Organizer and Chair: Janez Stare

• Relative Survival: Understanding the Concept and Promoting its Utilization, Jacques Esteve
• Regression Spline-based Flexible Relative Survival Model: Estimation, Inference and Validation, Michal Abrahamowicz, Amel Mahboubi, Catherine Quantin
• Goodness of Fit in Relative Survival Regression, Maja Pohar Perme, Janez Stare, Robin Henderson

IPM 3 Inference under Qualitative Restrictions

Organizer and Chair: Holger Dette

• Improving Point and Interval Estimates of Monotone Functions by Rearrangement, Victor Chemozhukov, Ivan Fernandez-Val, Alfred Galichon
• Monotonicity and Log-Concavity Constraints in Regression, Lutz Duembgen, Geurt Jongbloed
• Monotone Spectral Density Estimation, Dragi Anevski, Philippe Soulier

Discussant: Irene Gijbels

WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST

IPM 4 Semi- and Nonparametric Statistics

Organizer: Graciela Boente
Chair: Wenceslao Gonzalez Manteiga

• Estimation in Semiparametrics Models with Missing Data, Ingrid Van Keilegom, Song Chen
• On Consistency and Robustness of Support Vector Machines, Andreas Christmann, Ingo Steinwart
• ROC Curves in Nonparametric Location-scale Regression Models, Juan Carlos Pardo-Fernandez, Wenceslao Gonzalez-Manteiga, Ingrid Van Keilegom

Discussant: Stefan Sperlich

IPM 5 Model Building and Regularization

Organizer and Chair: Axel Munk

• Non-Euclidean Statistical Analysis of Covariance Matrices and Diffusion Tensors, Ian Dreyden
• Adaptive Modelling of Irregular, High Dimensional Functional and Image Data, Jeffrey Morris

Discussants: Stephan Huckermann and Victor Panaretos

IPM 6 Stochastic Geometry with Applications

Organizer and Chair: Viktor Benes

• Random Sets and Quantitative Finance, Ilya Molchanov, Michael Schmutz
• Invariant Transports of Stationary Random Measures, Guenter Last
• Estimation Variances in Local Stereology, Zbynek Pawlas, Eva B. Vedel Jensen
• Intrinsic Two-Way MANOVA for Shape Spaces, Stephan Huckemann, Thomas Hotz, Axel Munk

Discussant: Lothar Heinrich

THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST

IPM 7 Concentration Inequalities

Organizer and Chair: Sara Van de Geer

• Concentration of the Empirical Risk, Pascal Massart
• Lipschitz Functions and Concentration, Colin Mcdiarmid
• Applications of Concentration Inequalities in Graph Colouring via the Probabilistic Method, Bruce Reed

Discussant: Emmanuel Candes

IPM 10 The Role of Chance in Evolution

Organizer: Peter Jagers
Chair: Fima Klebaner

• Species Abundance Distributions in Two Classes of Models: Immigration from Mainland vs Mutant Substitution, Amaury Lambert
• Polymorphic Evolution Sequence and Evolutionary Branching in a Logistically Regulated Population, Nicolas Champagnat, Sylvie Méléard
• Modelling the Evolutionary Process of DNA-sequences, Arndt Von Haeseler, Steffen Klaere, Tanja Gesell

Discussant: Fima Klebaner

FRIDAY, 21 AUGUST

IPM 9 Statistical Modelling and Data Analysis for Neural Coding

Organizers: Elie Bienenstock and Britt Anderson
Chair: Britt Anderson

• Inferring Size and Temporal Precision of Correlated Neuron Group Activity from Population Measures, Sonja Gruen, Sebastien Louis
• Synthetic Spike Trains with Defined Pairwise Correlations, Ernst Niebur, Daniel Millman
• Nonparametric Spike Train Analysis via Resampling, Asohan Amarasingham
• Emergence of Cross-Correlation Functions in Neural Spike Interval Distributions, Jonathan Tapson

Discussant: Markus Diesmann

IPM 102 Invited Paper Meeting in Honour of David G. Kendall

(jointly organized with ISI)
Organizers: Jef L. Teugels, Wilfrid Kendall
Chair: Wilfrid Kendall

• David G. Kendall: His Life, His Work and His Significance for ISI, Jef L. Teugels
• David Kendall´s Contribution to the Application of Statistics in Archeology and Relates Matters, John Clifford Gower
• From Kendall Shape to Radon Shape via Structural Biology, Victor Panaretos

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Created: 27 May 2010

As a result of funding opportunities obtained by the ISI for the year 2010, limited funds have been made available to the ISI Sections from the ISI's World Bank Fund.

Applicants of the World Bank Fund are required to be permanent residents of recognised developing countries in order to apply for funding to participate in one of the two Bernoulli Society meetings that will take place during the year 2010:

• 28th European Meeting of Statisticians, Piraeus, Greece, August 17-22, 2010 (Piraeus-EMS)
• 34th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Osaka, Japan, September 6-10, 2010 (Osaka-SPA).

Those who wish to apply to the World Bank Fund for Bernoulli Society conferences are asked to please send an application, preferably via e-mail, to:
Shabani Mehta (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
International Statistical Institute,
P.O. Box 24070,
2490 AB The Hague,
The Netherlands

The application must include:

• An official proof from the local organizers of the acceptance to present a talk at the conference.
• A copy of approved abstract.
• A copy of the curriculum vitae of the applicant.

Deadline for applications is the 30th May 2010.

Confirmation of support will be informed by the 20th of June 2010.

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Created: 27 May 2010

Obituary for Lester Eli Dubins, 1920-2010, written by David Gilat, Ted Hill, Bill Sudderth

Lester E. Dubins, a distinguished probabilist and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at UC Berkeley, passed away peacefully in his home on February 11, 2010. He is survived by his son Benjamin, his sister Blanche, his nephews Aaron, Mathew, Michael and Ross and his nieces Marylyn and Sarah.

Lester grew up in New York City. His college education was interrupted by World War II in which he served as an Air Force officer stationed at a radar installation in Iceland. After the war, in the late 1940s, Lester continued working (as a civilian) for the radar research & development branch of the US Air Force. In 1951 he resumed his studies as a graduate student of mathematics at the University of Chicago where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1955 submitting a thesis on Generalized Random Variables under the guidance of Irving E. Segal. In those days Chicago's mathematics department was fortunate to have an excellent cohort of graduate students, among them Paul Cohen, Don Ornstein and Jack Feldman.

After a year at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and a few years at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Lester joined the Mathematics and Statistics departments at UC Berkeley in 1962, where he remained for the rest of his life. Lester was forced to retire at 70, shortly before the abolition of mandatory retirement age in public institutions in the USA went into effect. He challenged the university, won his case in court and was reappointed. He then continued teaching until retiring in 2004 by his own volition.

While still in Chicago, Lester met Jimmie Savage (then on the mathematics faculty there) and surprised him by showing that bold play is not uniquely optimal in classical Red & Black (roulette). Jimmie was impressed and invited Lester to join him in trying to better understand the probabilistic structure of gambling situations. This encounter developed into a collaboration generating several key papers and culminating (in 1965) in the ground-breaking monograph How to Gamble if You Must (Inequalities for Stochastic Processes) which presented a coherent mathematical theory of gambling processes and optimal behavior in gambling situations, pointing out their relevance to traditional approaches to probability. In consultation with Bruno de Finetti and under his influence, Dubins and Savage presented their theory in the finitely additive framework in order to bypass measurability technicalities inherent in maximizing an uncountable set of functions in searching for optimal strategies. Lester paid tribute to Jimmie Savage - to his remarkable intellect and scholarship, and to their mutual friendship - in a beautifully phrased preface to the Dover edition of the book which appeared in 1976, five years after Jimmie's untimely death at the age of 54.

Lester continued to contribute to finitely additive probability throughout his entire career. As late as 1999 he published a paper entitled Paths of Finitely Additive Brownian Motion need not be Bizarre, demonstrating that those paths can be, for example, continuous piecewise linear or piecewise polynomial functions, etc. Not unrelated to his fondness of finite additivity, was Lester's great admiration for Bruno de Finetti and his firm belief in the subjective nature of probability according to which probabilities should not be thought to be inherent in objects, but instead in one’s ideas and expectations about those objects.

Although primarily a probabilist, Lester had deep interest in mathematics in general. Thus scattered among his close to 100 publications (the latest of which appeared in 2009) are papers on a variety of mathematical themes, such as curves of minimal length (under some constraints), Tarski's Circle Squaring problem, convex analysis and geometry.

Lester was an unconventional teacher. He seemed unable to bore himself and his audience by a systematic recitation of a textbook. Even the most elementary material would receive a fresh and original treatment under his hands. In teaching as in research, Lester would never be satisfied with just having a logically correct proof of a statement, but would always strive for a natural, simplest possible argument. He was at his best in advanced graduate seminars and informal discussions. In front of small groups of colleagues, international visitors and graduate students he challenged his audience, exposed and explored his own thoughts and still-evolving ideas, and inspired them with unexpected basic questions and insights. He would often open a session asking if anyone had anything interesting to tell the class, and his seminars were fascinating Socratic dialogues that continued informally between regular sessions.

As much as he lived for mathematics, Lester also cared deeply about people, especially his students and friends, who came from all walks of life. He was always a champion of the underdog, whether they were California farmworkers or oppressed people anywhere, and was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties. He loved words and stories and humor, and led a vigorous life, traveling and hiking and mountain-biking into his eighties, roaring with laughter or immersed in explorations of mathematical subtleties as he went. He was a person of the highest integrity in everything he did, scientifically and socially, and did not bend to political or peer pressures. You did not ask Lester how he liked the restaurant you were in or how good a logical argument was, unless you were prepared for the polite but unadulterated truth. For those of us who were fortunate enough to know him well, hardly a day passes when we do not ask ourselves “What would Dubins have done in this situation?” or “What would Lester have said?” Lester Dubins was the quintessential maverick mathematician, and above all, an absolute gentleman and scholar.