After five groundbreaking conferences at Penn State, Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy VI was held at Carnegie Mellon University, June 6 to 10, 2016.

This meeting continued the interdisciplinary tradition of its predecessors, bringing together researchers in astronomy, cosmology, statistics, and machine learning to facilitate progress on the significant data analysis challenges that result from current and future astronomical sky surveys.

The program included

a keynote talk by Željko Ivezić (Univ. of Washington);

invited talks by astronomers/cosmologists Coryn Bailer-Jones (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy), Rebekah Dawson (Penn State), Laurent Eyer (Geneva), Daniel Foreman-Mackey (Univ. of Washington), Ashish Mahabal (Caltech), Rachel Mandelbaum (CMU), Yao-Yuan Mao (Stanford), Michael Schneider (LLNL), Pavlos Protopapas (Harvard), Uroš Seljak (Berkeley), Jean-Luc Starck (CEA Saclay), Michael Wood-Vasey (Pitt);

and by experts in statistical and machine learning methods: Ethan Anderes (UC Davis), Tamara Broderick (MITj, Jeremy Kubica (Google), Ann Lee (CMU), James Long (Texas A&M), Youssef Marzouk (MIT), Jon McAuliffe (UC Berkeley), Bodhisattva Sen (Columbia), Russ Salakhutdinov (CMU), and Robert Wolpert (Duke).

There were also interdisciplinary research talks from members of the SOC: Chris Genovese (CMU), Jessi Cisewski (Yale), Jeff Newman (Pitt), and Eric Ford (Penn State).

 

Organizers

Co-Chairs: Shirley Ho (CMU) and Chad Schafer (CMU)

Honorary Co-Chairs: Jogesh Babu (Penn State) and Eric Feigelson (Penn State)

Scientific Organizing Committee: Jessi Cisewski (Yale), Andy Connolly (Univ. of Washington), Eric Ford (Penn State), Christopher Genovese (CMU), Tom Loredo (Cornell), Jeffrey Newman (Univ. of Pittsburgh), David Ruppert (Cornell), David van Dyk (Imperial College), Benjamin Wandelt (IAP, Lagrange Institute)