Back in February it was decided that this year’s StanCon would be a series of virtual mini-symposia with different organizers instead of a single all-day event. Today the Stan Governing Body (SGB) announced that submissions are now open for anyone to propose organizing a session. Here’s the announcement from the SGB on the Stan forums: 

Following up on our previous announcement, the SGB is excited to announce a formal call for proposals for StanConnect 2021.

StanConnect is a virtual miniseries that will consist of several 3-hour meetings/mini-symposia. You can think of each meeting as a kind of organized conference “session.”

• Anyone can feel free to organize a StanConnect meeting as a “Session Chair”. Simply download the proposal form as a docx, fill it out, and submit to SGB via email ([email protected]) by April 26, 2021 (New York) . The meeting must be scheduled for sometime this year after June 1.
• The talks must involve Stan and be focused around a subject/topic theme. E.g. “Spatial models in Ecology via Stan”.
• You will see that though we provide a few “templates” for how to structure a StanConnect meeting, we are trying to avoid being overly prescriptive. Rather, we are giving Session Chairs freedom to invite speakers related to their theme and structure the 3-hr meeting as they see fit.
• If you have any questions, please feel free to post here.

I wasn’t involved in the decision to change the format but I really like the idea of a virtual miniseries. I thought the full day StanCon 2020 was great, but one nearly 24-hour global virtual conference feels like enough. And hopefully having a bunch of separately organized events will give more people a chance to get involved with Stan, either as an organizer, speaker, or attendee. 

Breaking news: no live stream. We’re recording, so we’ll put the videos online after the fact.

We don’t have enough bandwidth to live stream today.

StanCon 2018 starts today! We’re going to try our best to live stream the event on YouTube.

We have the same video setup as last year, but may be limited by internet bandwidth here at Asilomar.

If we’re up, we will these YouTube events on the Stan YouTube Channel (all times Pacific):

• Day 1: Wednesday, 10:30 am – 5 pm
• Day 2: Thursday, 10:30 am – 5 pm
• Day 3: Friday, 10:30 am – 3 pm

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

[Update: There’s a more recent post with the schedule.]

Save the date! The first Stan conference is going to be in NYC in January. Registration will open at the end of September.

When:

Saturday, January 21, 2017

9 am – 5 pm

Where:

Davis Auditorium, Columbia University

530 West 120th Street

4th floor (campus level), room 412

New York, NY 10027

Registration:

Registration will open at the end of September.

Early registration (on or before December 20, 2016):

– Student: $50

– Academic: $100

– Industry: $200

This will include coffee, lunch, and some swag.

Late Registration (December 21, 2016 and on):

– Student: $75

– Academic: $150

– Industry: $300

This will include coffee and lunch. Probably won’t get swag.

Contributed talks:

We’re looking for contributed talks. We will start accepting submissions at the end of September.

The contributed talks at StanCon will be based on interactive, self-contained notebooks, such as knitr or Jupyter, that will also take the place of proceedings.  For example, you might demonstrate a novel modeling technique or a simplified version of a novel application. Each submission should include the notebook and separate files containing the Stan program, data, initializations if used, and a permissive license for everything such as CC BY 4.0.

Tentative Schedule:

8:00- 9:00 Registration / Coffee / Breakfast

9:00 – 9:20 Opening remarks

9:20 – 10:30 Session 1

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 – 12:30 Session 2

12:30 – 2:00 Lunch

2:00 – 3:15 Session 3

3:15 – 3:45 Coffee break

3:45 – 5:00 Session 4

Sponsorship:

We are looking for some sponsorship to either defer costs or provide travel assistance. Please email [email protected] for more information.

Organizers:

Michael Betancourt (Columbia University)

Tamara Broderick (MIT)

Jonah Gabry (Columbia University)

Andrew Gelman (Columbia University)

Ben Goodrich (Columbia University)

Daniel Lee (Columbia University)

Eric Novik (Stan Group Inc)

Lizzie Wolkovich (Harvard University)