Conference: Travel Awards for 14th International Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics

This award supports junior researcher travel to attend the 14th International Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics that will be held on 23-27th, 2025 at UCLA's campus, Los Angeles, CA, USA. This conference is held biannually and is known to bring together leading experts and talented young researchers working on applications and theory of nonparametric Bayesian statistics. It is an official section meeting of the Bayesian Nonparametrics (BNP) section of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). The BNP 14 meeting is also co-sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), and it is endorsed by the Section of Bayesian Statistical Sciences of the American Statistical Association. The main goals of the conference are to promote the interaction among scientists who develop and use BNP methods; to encourage discussions among researchers in various areas and fields of study; to foster cross-fertilization of ideas; to facilitate small group discussions among senior and junior researchers; and to disseminate results of the conference as widely as possible. More than 250 participants are expected to attend. BNP methods are statistical procedures that favor flexibility which permits relaxing many assumptions that are often times very rigid and/or hard to verify. Due to this, there has been a surge in the number of fields that have begun to employ BNP methods such as genetics, archaeology, psychology, economics, neuroscience among others. National Science Foundation support will enable the participation of 13 junior participants, including graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, at the conference. The International Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics is the premier conference of BNP methods and allows weeklong discussions by including a good mix of methodological, applied, and theoretical sessions. The topics of these sessions include BNP connected to deep learning, Bayesian density estimation, scalable nonparametric regression, hazard rate and survival function estimation (without or with covariates), estimation of spectral distribution of a time series, estimation of conditional density and density regression, classification, clustering, and estimation of the distribution of latent variables such as random effects and so on. NSF participant support is directed to individuals with evidence of high-quality, early-career research accomplishments. All the verified invited and contributed speakers are listed on the conference website at https://bnp14.org/. 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.