StanCon2018 Early Registration ends Nov 10

StanCon is happening at the beautiful Asilomar conference facility at the beach in Monterey California for three days starting January 10, 2018. We have space for 200 souls and this will sell out.

If you don’t already know, Stan is the rising star of probabilistic modeling with Bayesian analysis. If you do statistics, machine learning or data science then you need to know about Stan.

StanCon offers a full schedule of invited talks, submitted papers, and tutorials unavailable in any other format. Balancing the intellectual intensity of cutting edge statistical modeling are fun activities like indoor R/C airplane building/flying/designing and non-snobby blind wine tasting for after dinner activities. We will have the first ever “wear your poster” reception–see the call for posters below. And no parallel sessions–you get the entire StanCon2018, not a slice.

Go to http://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2018 and register.

Invited Talks

  • Andrew Gelman
    Department of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University
  • Susan Holmes
    Department of Statistics, Stanford University
  • Frank Harrell, Jr.
    School of Medicine and Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
  • Sophia Rabe-Hesketh
    Educational Statistics and Biostatistics, University of California, Berkeley
  • Sean Taylor and Ben Letham
    Facebook Core Data Science
  • Manuel Rivas
    Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
  • Talia Weiss
    Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

These rock stars have agreed to leave their entourages, groupies and bad habits at home and will start their shows talks on time and leave you wanting more.

Submitted talks:

We have 18 accepted talks ranging from public policy viewed through Bayesian analysis to painful theory papers. And we have Facebook, and space people from NASA. Talks are self-contained knitr or Jupyter notebooks that will be made publicly available after the conference.

Tutorials

We have tutorials that start at the crack of 8am for those desiring further edification beyond the awesome program. Total time ranges from 6 hours to 1 hour depending on topic—these will be parallel but don’t conflict with the main conference.

  • Introduction to Stan
    Know how to program? Know basic statistics? Curious about Bayesian analysis and Stan? This is the course for you. Hands on, focused and an excellent way to get started working in Stan. 2 hours every morning 8am to 10am.
  • Executive decision making the Bayesian way
    This is for nontechnical managers to learn the core of decision making under uncertainty and how to interpret the talks that they will be attending the rest of the day. 1 hour/day every day.
  • Advanced Modeling in Stan
    The hard stuff led by the best of the best. Very interactive, very intense. Varying topics, every day 1-2 hours.

Poster call for participation

We will take poster submissions on a rolling basis until December 5th. One page exclusive of references is the desired format but anything that gives us enough information to make a decision is fine. We will accept/reject within 48 hours. Send to [email protected].

The only somewhat odd requirement is that your poster must be “wearable” to the 5pm reception where you will be a walking presentation. Great way to network, signboard supplies will be available so you need only have sheets of paper which can be attached to signboard material which coincidentally will be the source airframe material for the R/C airplane activities following dinner.

Fun Stuff

Learning is fun but we anticipate that blowing off a little steam will be called for.

  • R/C Airplanes
    After dinner on day 1 we will provide designs and building materials to create your own R/C airplane. The core design can be scratch built in 90 minutes or less at which point, and weather dependent, we will learn to fly our planes indoors or outdoors. See http://brooklynaerodrome.com for an idea of the style of airplane. You can also create your own designs and we will have night illumination gear.
  • Snob-free Blind Wine Tasting
    By day 2 you will have gotten to know your fellow attendees so some social adventure is called for. This activity has proved wildly successful at DARPA conferences and they invented the internet so it can’t be all bad. Participants taste wines without knowing what they are.
    That’s it! StanCon2018 is going to be a pressure cooker of learning and fun. Don’t miss it.

Early registration

Early bird registration ends 10 November 2017.

Go to http://mc-stan.org/events/stancon2018 and register.

 

StanCon Organizing Committee

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