Conference: Statistical Foundations of Data Science and their Applications

This award supports a diverse and inclusive three-day conference titled "Statistical Foundations of Data Science and their Applications" to take place at Princeton University on May 8-10, 2023. Data science is a thriving broad discipline that combines various existing fields including classical and modern statistics, biostatistics, econometrics and machine learning, and has by now transformed the way that quantitative research is conducted in the social, behavioral and biomedical sciences, as well as in finance, industry and government more generally. The main goal of the conference is to bring together junior and senior scholars working on all aspects of foundational and applied data science, while also offering unique opportunities for mentoring junior and underrepresented scholars (e.g., underrepresented minorities, women, and persons with disabilities) across a broad range of disciplines. While data science combines and potentiates the best of many scientific areas of study, it is regrettably not always the case that scholars working of those specific areas interact with each other in a synergistic way. Furthermore, for young scholars it is often hard to reach out outside their subfields, hampering their intellectual and professional development. These intellectual barriers sometimes reduce diversity and inclusion due to the socially inefficient intellectual silos present in different academic and professional communities. A key goal of the conference is to be highly interdisciplinary and open to new intellectual ideas and approaches, hoping to reach out to academia, industry and government. Another equally important and highly complementary key goal of the conference is to foster junior and underrepresented scholars by offering them specifically tailored activities to such goal, in addition to offering them opportunities to interact and network with many top data science scholars from around the world that will be in attendance. The website with details about the conference is https://orfe.princeton.edu/events/dsconf/ This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.