International Federation ofClassification Societies
Newsletter

President: Berthold Lausen

Number 60

December, 2019
Editor:

The
International
Federation
ofClassification Societies, founded in 1985, iscomposed of:
Associação Portuguesa de Classificação e
Análise de Dados, British Classification
Society, Latin American Society ofClassification and Data Analysis, The
Classification Society, Classification andMultivariate Statistics Group of the
Hungarian Statistical Association, GfKl Data
Science Society, Greek Society of Data
Analysis, Irish Pattern Recognition andClassification Society, Japanese Classification
Society, Korean Classification Society,
Moroccan Classification Society, SociétéFrancophone de Classification, Multivariate
Data Analysis Group of the South African
Statistical
Association,
Multivariate
Statistics and Classification Group of the
Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations
Research, Società Italiana di Statistica,
Statistical Society of Slovenia, Vereniging
voor Ordinatie en Classificatie and Section ofClassification and Data Analysis of thePolish Statistical Society.
The IFCS is a non-profit, non-politicalscientific organization, the aims of which are
to further classification research. Amongother activities, the IFCS organises a biennial
conference, and supports two journals:
Advances in Data Analysis and Classificationand the Journal of Classification.

IFCS Homepage: http://www.ifcs.info

Katrijn Van Deun

Contents
Words from the IFCS President
News from the IFCS Secretary
News from the IFCS Treasurer
News from the IFCS Publication Officer
Report on IFCS 2019
IFCS 2021: First announcement and call for
papersNews from CLAD
News from MDAG
News from SKAD
News from JCS
News from GfKl Data Science SocietyNews from The Classification SocietyNews from SoLCAD
News from CLADAG
News from VOC
Upcoming Conferences and Meetings

Words from the IFCS President
Dear friends and colleagues,
Looking back at the year 2019 we had our IFCS
conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, August 26-29,
2019. I like to thank Theodore Chadjipadelis asconference chair, the scientific programcommittee, the local organizers and all making theconference a great success. The organisation of the
IFCS2021 in Porto, Portugal, on 24-28 August2021 is already underway, see the report by Paula
Brito.
I like to take this opportunity to thank all membersof the executive committee for their hard work andexcellent contributions. In January 2020 Angela
Montanari will become president. I am sure that
Angela will be an excellent president of IFCS.

I wish you all a wonderful and successful new year
2020.
Very best wishes,
Berthold Lausen
IFCS President

News from the IFCS Secretary
Since the last Newsletter the Executive Committee(EC) has met on 29 March, 9 May, 12 July, and 27
August 2019. These meetings were mostly used inorder to discuss the preparation of the IFCS-2019
in Thessaloniki. Also, the bid of the JoCLAD tohost the IFCS-2021 in Porto was discussed and put
to a vote of the IFCS Council, where it was
eventually approved. Further discussion items
involved a new visualisation of the IFCS
membership, regional structures, and activities towin potential new membership societies, although
no final decisions were made on these.
On 28 August 2019 the IFCS Council met inperson in Thessaloniki. With 27 delegates this wasa well attended meeting. Once more, much of themeeting was devoted to reporting on the IFCS2019 and discussing the planning of IFCS-2021 in
Porto. The proposal to have a pre-conference
proceedings volume for the Porto conference andpost-conference special issues of journals wasapproved.
Another issue that was discussed was theupcoming elections. The Council decided that the
Secretary should put together a calendar ofelections. Here is a list of the next upcoming
elections:
Between October and the end of the year 2019(*):
 Election of the President-Elect Election of the Secretary Election of the Treasurer
 Election of three new members of the FinanceCommittee replacing Ahmed Moussa, Helena
Bacelar-Nicolau, and Andrzej Sokolowski
March 2020
 Election of a new Election Committee member
replacing Anuska Ferligoj
Between October and the end of the year 2020(*):
 Election of the Publication OfficerElection of two new Additional Members of theCouncil replacing Iven van Mechelen andFriedrich Leisch Election of a new Finance Committee member
replacing Francois Bruckner
March 2021
 Election of a new Election Committee member
replacing Tae Rim Lee(*) According to the IFCS Election Rules:"Elections for the Executive Committee and the
additional Council members should be organizedfrom 1st October (asking for candidates) to 31st
December (voting results)."
As always, I remind you that the IFCS Secretarytries to keep the IFCS Directory up to date. Please
make in any case sure (reminded or not) that you
tell me all relevant changes regarding the member
societies (Presidents, Treasurers, Council
Delegates, Distributors of the IFCS Newsletter; I
always need email addresses and the end of theirterms so that I can remind the society again at thatpoint).
Note that the IFCS Directory is published under"Governance" on the IFCS website, howevernames and email addresses of persons who don't
explicitly consent to the publication of thisinformation are not listed. I will ask everyone whotakes up these positions in the member societies
for such a consent (although consenting is notmandatory).
With all the best wishes,
Christian Hennig
IFCS Secretary

News from the IFCS Treasurer
Please note that statements for the membershipdues for 2019/2020 will be sent out shortly to thetreasurers of the member societies. If your society
had a change in treasurer, please ensure that thelatest contact details are up to date with ourSecretary, Christian Hennig.
Sugnet Lubbe
IFCS Treasurer

News from the IFCS Publication Officer
First of all, I would like to extend my personalgratitude to Theodore Chadjipadelis and his teamfor organizing an unforgetable IFCS meeting in
Thessaloniki. Second, I would like to wish Angela
Montanari all the best in her new role as IFCS
President.
Katrijn Van Deun
IFCS Publication Officer

Report on IFCS 2019
The last IFCS conference, IFCS 2019, was hosted
by the Greek Society of Data Analysis at
Thessaloniki Concert Hall, Greece. The
conference was held from August 26th to August
29th.
Theodore
Chadjipadelis(Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki) chaired the Local
Organizing Committee and the Scientific Program
Committee with Berthold Lausen (IFCS President)
and Tae Rim Lee (Korea National Open
University) as the vice-chairpersons. IFCS 2019saw over 220 participants from across the country
and from around the world. At the conference, a
total of 178 papers were presented. The
Conference program was organized over plenary
invited sessions and contributed paper sessions.
Vladimir Batagelj (University of Ljubljiana),
Theodoros Evgeniou (INSEAD), MichaelGreenacre (University of Pompeu Fabra), David
Hunter (Penn State Department of Statistics),
Sofia Olhede (UCL), Julie Josse (Ecole
Polytechnique), delivered plenary talks. The
president’s invited lecture: Deciding what’s what:classification from A to Z was delivered by David
J. Hand (Imperial College London), who received
the IFCS 2019 Research Medal. Sanjeena Dang,
Abby Flynt, Brian Franczak and Cristina Tortora
received IFCS 2019 Chikio Hayashi Awards,
Aghiles Salah the IFCS 2019 Helga and Wolfgang
Gaul Stiftung Award, Ali Mertcan Köse andHanneke van der Hoef the IFCS 2019Student/Postdoctoral Fellow Paper Competition
and Travel Award.
The efforts of our colleagues of the Greek Societyof Data Analysis made this conference such a
success. The high quality of the contributions was
assured by the work of all members of the
Scientific Program Committee. Our deepest
gratitude goes to all of them. Special thanks must
be addressed to ARTION Conferences and Events.
A post-proceedings volume will be edited by
Theodore Chadjipadelis, Berthold Lausen,
Angelos Markos, Tae Rim Lee, Angela Montanari
and Rebecca Nugent, and will be published by

Springer in the prestigious series on Studies inClassification, Data Analysis and Knowledge
Organization (ISSN: 1431-8814). Authors areinvited to submit their contributions via website
https://www.conftool.pro/ifcs2019/. The deadline
for submitting up to 8 pages is January 31st, 2020.

IFCS 2021: First Announcement andCall for Papers
The 17th conference of the International Federationof Classification Societies will take place in Porto,
Portugal, on 24-28 August 2021. IFCS 2021 is a
joint organization of the Portuguese Association
for Classification and Data Analysis, CLAD, andthe Faculty of Economics of the University ofPorto, FEP-UP. The conference will feature
keynote speakers, invited and contributed
sessions, and organized streams on specific topics.
Preceding the conference itself, tutorials on up-todate fields will be organized on August 24th. A preconference book of proceedings is planned to be
published in the Springer Collection “Studies inClassification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge
Organization”. The Local Organizing Committee
is working enthusiastically to make sure IFCS
2021 will be a successful conference and islooking forward to welcoming all of you in Porto.
Do not forget to add IFCS 2021 to your agenda!
The deadlines for submission are as follows:
Submission of full papers (invited and contributed
papers): January 15th, 2021
Submission of Single Abstracts: April 9th, 2021
To learn more about IFCS 2021:
www.ifcs2021.fep.up.pt .
Contact: ifcs2021@fep.up.pt
Paula Brito

News from CLAD
JOCLAD 2020
The XXVII Annual Meeting of CLAD will takeplace in Lisbon. JOCLAD 2020 will be held from
April 02 to 04, 2020, at the Universidade Lusófona
de Lisboa, close to the Universidade de Lisboa
campus, where CLAD headquarters are located.
Participants will include researchers, teachers,
students and users, working with Classification
and Data Analysis and other data science relatedareas. JOCLAD 2020 scientific program includesplenary and thematic sessions, contributed papers
and poster sessions. Two short courses will takeplace on April 1st. JOCLAD 2019 program andadditional information may be found at
http://www.joclad.ipt.pt/joclad2020/, as well as on
CLAD´s website http://www.clad.pt/.
CLAD’s Book Series
Authors of research papers presented at JOCLAD
are invited to submit full papers for publication in
the next book CLADMAp IV. The third issue
CLADMAp III of CLAD’s Book Series“Classificação e Análise de Dados. Métodos e
Aplicações” was published and distributed during
the previous JOCLAD 2019. Online copies of all
the books will be available on CLAD’s website.
Cooperation with Sister Societies
According to the Protocol Agreement of associate
membership between CLAD and Sociedade
Portuguesa de Estatística, SPE, a plenary session
on behalf of CLAD will be presented during thenext annual SPE meeting. Organizers are Paula
Brito and Fernanda Sousa. During JOCLAD 2019a plenary session was organized on behalf of theSPE.
CLAD hosts IFCS 2021
The next IFCS conference will be hosted by the
Associação Portuguesa de Classificação e Análise
de Dados, as approved during the IFCS 2019conference. IFCS 2021 will be held at Faculdadede Economia da Universidade do Porto, in Porto,
from August 24 to August 28, 2021. Email:ifcs2021@fep.up.pt. Further information will soon
be available on the conference website
www.ifcs2021.fep.up.pt.
Helena Bacelar-Nicolau

News from MDAG
MDAG’s contributions to IFCS 2019
South Africa was well represented at the IFCS
conference in Thessaloniki with eight MDAG
members in attendance. Two invited paper
sessions were organised by Prof. Niël le Roux onbehalf of MDAG. These sessions were dedicatedto the late Professor John Gower.
Annual MDAG meeting
MDAG will be presenting a full-day workshop on
Tuesday, 26 November 2019, prior to the annual
South African Statistical Association (SASA)

conference. The workshop will focus on theapplication of multivariate data analysis,
consisting of short lectures by six presenters on
various topics. The following topics will be
discussed:
 Visualisation of continuous multivariate data
(Prof. Sugnet Lubbe – Stellenbosch
University)
 Categorical data: Visualisation and missing
values (Mrs. Johané Nienkemper-Swanepoel –
Stellenbosch University and Dr. Michael vonMaltitz – University of the Free State) Piecewise Structural Equation Modelling (Dr.
Sebnem Er – University of Cape Town)
 Auxiliary variables in Latent Profile Analysis(LPA) and methods to estimate a distal
outcome model (Mrs. Esme Jordaan – South
African Medical Research Council)
 Dimension reduction: Unsupervised andsupervised feature selection methods (Prof.
Berthold Laussen – University of Essex andcurrent IFCS president)
The annual MDAG meeting will take place during
the SASA 2019 conference in Port Elizabeth,South Africa (26-29 November).
Johané Nienkemper-Swanepoel

News from SKAD
The 28th Scientific Conference of Classification
and Data Analysis Section (SKAD) of Polish
Statistical Society (and the 33rd Taxonomic
Conference) on “Classification and Data Analysis− Theory and Applicationsˮ was held between
18th-20th September 2019 at the Faculty of
Economics and Management of the University ofSzczecin. The conference was organized by both
SKAD and the Institute of Econometrics andStatistics of the University of Szczecin.
The conference topics focused on: theory (taxonomy, discriminant analysis,
linear ordering, multivariate statisticalanalysis, continuous variables analysis,
discrete variables analysis, symbolic data
analysis, data visualization), and applications (spatial data analysis; data
analysis in finance, marketing, medicine,
psychology, archaeology, etc.; computer
applications of statistical methods).
The program included 15 sessions: 2 plenary
sessions, 12 parallel sessions and a poster session.

There were 84 conference participants who
presented 44 papers and 34 posters. The articles
after the conference will be reviewed and thenpublished in Folia Oeconomica Stetinensia (thejournal of University of Szczecin) and in the
Springer book series: Studies in Classification,
Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization.
The next Conference of Section of Classification
and Data Analysis of Polish Statistical Society“Classification and Data Analysis: Theory andApplicationsˮ will be held in 2020, presumably in
September.
Mateusz BaryłaNews from JCS(I) New Executive Members of JCS
The following list includes the new staff of theJapanese Classification Society elected according
to the articles of the JCS governing the election of
Executive Members. The tenure for thesemembers is from April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2021.
President
Koji Kurihara, Okayama University, 1-1-1
Tsushima-naka, Kita-ku, Okayama 700-8530
Japan, kurihara@ems.okayama-u.ac.jp
Auditors
Tadashi Imaizumi, Tama University. Fumi
Hayashi, Toyo Eiwa University.
Executive Committee Members
Kohei Adachi, Fumio Ishioka, Tatsuo Otsu,
Akinori Okada, Makiko Oda, Yutaka Kano,
Takafumi Kubota, Fumitake Sakaori, Mika SatoIlic, Nobuo Shimizu, Akinobu Takeuchi, Makoto
Tomita, Yuki Toyoda, Atsuho Nakayama,
Yasumasa Baba, Atsuhiro Hayashi, Masahiro
Mizuta, Hiroshi Yadohisa, Kazunori Yamaguchi,
Yoshiro Yamamoto

Gakuin University, yokoyama@busi.aoyama.ac.jp
Treasurer: Makiko Oda, National Defense
Medical College, oda@ndmc.ac.jp
The other members are Akinobu Takeuchi (Jissen
Women's University), Yuki Toyoda (Hosei
University), Kuniyoshi Hayashi (St.Luke’s
International
University),
Mika
Sato-Ilic(University of Tsukuba), Hiroshi Yadohisa(Doshisha University), Fumitake Sakaori (Chuo
University),
AtsuhoNakayama(TokyoMetropolitan University), Masahiro Mizuta(Hokkaido University), Ryozo Yoshino (TheInstitute of Statistical Mathematics), Tatsuo Otsu
(National Center for University Entrance
Examinations) and Akinori Okada (TamaUniversity).
(II) Report of the 37th Annual Meeting of theJapanese Classification Society
The 38th Annual Meeting was held on June 15thand 16th, 2019 at Jissen Women's University,
Shibuya Campus, Tokyo. The program of themeeting comprised 13 presentations in all, divided
into two invited talk sessions, one student session,and 3 general sessions.
(III) Awards and Fellows of JCS in 2019
In 2019, award winners of contribution award,
paper award, encouraging award and fellows of
JCS are selected as follows: Distinguished Career Award: Shizuhiko
Nishisato (Professor Emeritus, The Universityof Toronto) Outstanding Paper Award: Sayaka Arai(National Center for University Entrance
Examinations) Young Researcher Award: Masaaki Okabe(Doshisha University)
 Fellows: Shuichi Iwatsubo (Professor
Emeritus, National Center for University
Entrance Examinations)(IV) The 1st Data Analysis Seminar in 2019

Secretariat Members
Secretary: Makoto Tomita, Yokohama City
University, mtomita@ism.ac.jp
General affairs: Fumio Ishioka, Okayama
University, fishioka@okayama-u.ac.jp
Takafumi
Kubota,Tama
University,
kubota@tama.ac.jp
YoshiroYamamoto,
Tokai
University,
yama@tokai-u.jp
Public relations: Satoru Yokoyama, Aoyama

The 1st Data analysis seminar in 2019 was held on
May 18, 2019 at Tokai University, Takanawa
Campus, Tokyo. The seminar consisted of twoparts: Visualization of geographic information
with R; and Hot-spot detection in spatial data andits practice.
Hiroyasu AbeNews from GfKl
New Managing Board
During its meeting of members at ECDA 2019 in
Bayreuth a new Managing Board of GFKL has
been elected which took office on April 16, 2019.
The new board is comprised of Adalbert F.X.
Wilhelm (Jacobs University Bremen), Hans A.
Kestler (University of Ulm), Friederike Paetz(Technical University Clausthal), Andreas GeyerSchulz (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Eyke
Hüllermeier (University of Paderborn), Ursula
Garczarek (Cytel), Dominik Heider (Philipps
University Marburg). A big thank you goes to theoutgoing Board Members, in particular Berthold
Lausen, who has been presiding the board for thelast six years, and Daniel Baier, who has been
responsible for public relations during that time.
Meeting of the working group Data Analysis
and Numerical Classification
On October 10 and 11, 2019 the working group
Data Analysis and Numerical Classification holds
its annual autumn conference. This year’s
conference will be held in honor of Claus Weihs,
former president of the GFKL, who will retire
from TU Dortmund this autumn. The conference
theme is Musicology and the preliminary program
is available here http://www.gfkl.org/ag-dankherbsttagung-2019/
1st Working Group Meeting of AG
MARKETING
The 1st Working Group Meeting of AG
MARKETING will be held at Schloss Karlsruhe
from 14th to 15th November, 2019, hosted under
the umbrella of the GfKl (Gesellschaft fürKlassifikation e.V.). The general theme is“Advanced data analysis techniques withmarketing applications”.
AG Marketing invites methodological, theoreticalor empirical papers which aim to contribute to theunderstanding of quantitative marketing issues.
This first workshop is connected to a Call for
Papers for a special issue in the Journal of Businessand Economics (JBE), one of the leading academic
journals for business and management (VHB:
B). The CfP is not limited to any specific field of
marketingandwelcomesquantitative
contributions that can help to improve marketing
decisions in areas like product innovation
management, sales management, pricing,advertising, market segmentation, consumer

behavior etc. However, papers are expected
to contribute over the extant literature byproposing sophisticated new data analysis
methods in order to extract relevant informationfrom marketing data.
Interested researchers are invited to submit an
abstract for presentation. Abstracts will undergo apeer-review process. Accepted presenters of the 1st
WorkingGroup
MeetingofAG
MARKETING will have the opportunity to submit
a full paper for a special issue to the Journal ofBusiness Economics (Guest editors: Friederike
Paetz, Winfried. J. Steiner, Harald Hruschka).
Important Deadlines:






Abstract submission: Please submit yourabstract (max. 1800 characters, plain text) until
6th of October, 2019 via mail to agmarkworkshop@tu-clausthal.de
Notification about acceptance: until 14th ofOctober, 2019
Registration: Please register via mail toagmark-workshop@tu-clausthal.de until 21stof October, 2019.
Submission Deadline for special issue in
JBE: 30th of April, 2020
Adalbert WilhelmNews from The Classification Society(I) Report on the 2019 Annual Meeting of The
Classification Society
The 48th annual meeting of The Classiﬁcation
Society was held at the City Centre Campus of
MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada,from Thursday June 19 to Saturday, June 22, 2019.
The meeting was sponsored by the MacEwan
Department of Mathematics and Statistics and theCanadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI),
and hosted by the current secretary/treasurer of
The Classification Society, Brian Franczak, who
had onsite support from Dr. Ion Bica (MacEwan).
Brian Franczak and Paul McNicholas, the current
president of the Classiﬁcation Society, hadprepared an impressive conference program. The
Scientific Program Committee (SCP) was chaired
by Paul McNicholas; other members of the SCP
were Brian Franczak, Stephen France, and Abby
Flynt.
The President’s Invited Address was given by

Isobel Claire Gormley, University College Dublin,
Ireland, who discussed state of the art techniques
for model-based approaches to clustering highdimensional data where the number of variables islarge. The focus was on developments in factor
analytic methods that are well known toaccommodate big data. The utility of theseapproaches was illustrated through highdimensional benchmark and real data sets.
Keynote lectures were given by Antonio Punzo,
University of Catania, on clustering data when theunderlying normal distributions are contaminated;by Brianna Heggeseth, Macalester College, on
tree-based clustering of longitudinal data, and by
Hans Friedrich Köhn, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, on the use of nonparametricmethods in cognitively diagnostic assessment.
The Distinguished Dissertation Award 2019 of
The Classification Society had been awarded toAnjali Silva, Princess Margaret Cancer CentreUniversity Health Network, for her thesis on theapplication of machine learning and Bayesianclustering of discrete-valued gene expression datafor identifying gene co-expression networks. The
recipient presented her research during a special
invited session.
Invited sessions were also held on recent advancesof clustering and applications of classification withspeakers Cristina Anton, MacEwan University,
Canada, Guangliang Chen, San Jose State
University, Brian Franczak, MacEwan University,
Canada, Bei Jiang, University of Alberta, Canada,
Rebecca Nugent, Carnegie Melon University,
Pittsburgh, and Meredith Wallace, University ofPittsburgh.
A special Session in Honour of Professor Stanley
Sclove featured Stanley Sclove, University of
Illinois at Chicago, Stephen France, Mississippi
State University, Herbie Lee, University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz, and Paul McNicholas,
McMaster University, Canada.
(II) The 2020 Annual Meeting of The
Classification Society
The 2020 annual meeting of The Classification
Society will be held at Bucknell University inLewisburg, PA, from June 17-20, 2020. The
President’s Invited Address will be given by Markde Rooij, Leiden University. Plenary speakers
include Jim Rohlf, SUNY Stony Brook, Felipe

Barrientos, Florida State University, and Nema
Dean, University of Glasgow. Invited speakers
include Sam Adhikari, NYU, Lucas Mentch,
University of Pittsburgh, Lynn Lin, PSU andDavid Banks, Duke University. Abstract
submission will open on The Classification
Society
websiteFebruary10,2020(https://tcs.wildapricot.org/Meeting).
Pleasecontact Abby Flynt, the incoming president of The
Classification
Society,atabby.flynt@bucknell.edu in case of any questions.
We hope you will join us at Bucknell!
(III) The 2020 Distinguished Dissertation
Award of The Classification Society: Call for
Nominations
Each year, the Classification Society offers aDistinguished Dissertation Award for an
outstanding PhD dissertation on the theme ofclustering, classification, or related areas of data
analysis, encompassing associated theory and/or
applications. The
Classification
Society
Distinguished Dissertation Award is supported by
Springer.
The 2020 Classification Society Distinguished
Dissertation AwardThe 2020 Award totals 500 USD in book vouchers
from Springer and the winner will be invited tomake a presentation in a special session at the 2020
Classification Society Annual Meeting, which will
be held at Bucknell University from June 17-20,
2020. The Classification Society will cover travel
expenses to the 2020 Annual Meeting of at most
1,000 USD for a North American-based Awardwinner or at most 1,500 USD for an Award winner
based elsewhere.
Criteria for nomination for the Distinguished
Dissertation Award include: the main topic of the dissertation is inclassification, clustering or a closely relatedarea; the dissertation contains innovative work intheory/methodology and/or or innovative orwell developed application(s); and the literature review is thorough.
Eligibility
To be eligible for nomination, a Ph.D. dissertationmust have been successfully completed—including successful defense—within the calendar
year 2019. Nominations may be made by the
dissertation author, supervisor, or related person,
and must be sent by email. A nomination must

include contact information for the nominator andnominee (if different), a URL where an online
copy of the dissertation can be accessed by themembers of the Award Committee, and anelectronic (e.g., scanned) cover letter, written andsigned by the nominator, stating the date of final
completion of the Ph.D. dissertation and outlining
why the dissertation merits the award. The
nominator must also arrange for two externalreferee reports to be sent directly to the chair of theAward committee. If possible, the referees should
be arms-length from the dissertation author andtheir supervisor. Cover letters should include full
bibliographic details for any published papers,
proceedings, book chapters, or similar scholarlymaterial that have arisen from the dissertation. For
non-English language dissertations, nominators
are requested to provide an extended abstract inEnglish and, where relevant, to highlight any
papers, proceedings, book chapters, or similarscholarly material associated with the dissertationthat have been published in English.
The 2020 Distinguished Dissertation Award
Committee
The 2020 Award Committee comprises: Dr. Sanjeena Dang, Binghamton University,
United States (Chair), Dr. Stephen France, Mississippi State
University, United States, and Dr. Paul McNicholas, McMaster University,
Canada.
Nominations
Nominations and external referee reports must be
submitted to the chair of the Award Committee,
Sanjeena Dang, at <sdang ‘at’ binghamton dot
edu>, on or before 11:59pm (EST) on February 1,
2020
(see
also
https://tcs.wildapricot.org/Dissertation-Award).
Results will be announced approximately twomonths after this submission deadline.
Hans-Friedrich Köhn

News from SoLCAD
XII International Symposium on
Mathematical Methods Applied to the Sciences
XII International Symposium on Mathematical
Methods Applied to the Sciences (SIMMAC) and11th SoLCAD Encounter for Data Analysis andClassification, in San José, Costa Rica, 25-28
February
2020.
Website:http://simmac.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/en. Deadline forsubmission: November 30, 2019.
V Latin American Conference on StatisticalComputing
V Latin American Conference on StatisticalComputing (LACSC), in Mexico City, Mexico, 911 June, 2020. Website to be announced.
Workshop and Winter School Geometric andTopological Data Analysis
Workshop and Winter School Geometric andTopological Data Analysis, Guanajuato, Mexico,
20-24
January
2020.
Website:http://atd2020.eventos.cimat.mx/
Javier Trejos

News from CLADAG(I) CLADAG2019
The 12th Scientific Meeting of the Classification
and Data Analysis Group of the Italian StatisticalSociety, CLADAG2019, has been held at the
University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy,
from 11th to 13th September 2019.
After the successful CLADAG conferences in
Milan (2017) and Cagliari (2015), 193 scholars
attended this year conference, with contributions
from 314 authors of 28 different countries:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan,
Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Serbia,
Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
Tunisia, United Kingdom, and United States ofAmerica.
The conference hosted five keynote talks: Unifying Data Units and Models in (Co-)
Clustering, by Christophe Biernacki, Lille, Statistics with a human face, by Adrian
Bowman, UK; Bayesian Model-Based Clustering with
Flexible and Sparse Priors, by Bettina Grün,
Linz; Grinding massive information into feasible
statistics: current challenges and opportunities
for data scientists, by Francesco Mola,
Cagliari; Statistical challenges in the analysis ofcomplex responses in biomedicine, by Sylvia
Richardson, Cambridge.

The conference had 32 invited and a series ofcontributed sessions as well. Invited sessionsorganized by the SKAD, GfKl and SEIO sistersocieties were highly appreciated.
Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi, President at ESSEC
Paris, organized and chaired the Round table on
Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Business,with Jean-Pierre Bokobza, Senior Managing
Director of Accenture Digital, Fikria Chaouki,
Senior expert Advanced analytics & AI for
business at Accor, Monica Pratesi at University of
Pisa, President of the Italian Statistical Society,
Jeroen Rombouts, Accenture Strategic Business
Analytics Chair at ESSEC and Stefania Rubrichi,
Research scientist at Orange’s Sense Laboratory.
A bridge among young people in the Academy andin Data-Science enterprises was also launchedthrough the organization of a data contest powered
by TIM, the largest Italian telecommunicationcompany.
The social program has been rich, as well. A
networking event with music, food, and drink took
place on September 11th with a concert by the“MLT – Musica Libera Tutti” ensemble, withclassic and modern music. A special guided tour tothe Montecassino Abbey, with amazing sunset
views, and the conference dinner at Mignano
Castle were held on September 12th.
This year, the Scientific Board of ClaDAG decided
to initiate a program to honor distinguishedprofessors who excel in research and are strongly
related to our scientific community. We started
this course by marking our huge gratitude and deep
admiration for Professor Geoffrey McLachlan,
giving him the perpetual membership to ClaDAG.
Finally, the Conference proceedings have been
published in the Cladag2019 Book of Short papers(with ISBN), available on-line. Authors were also
invited to submit a full paper in the Springer
Series “Studies in Classification, Data Analysis
and Knowledge Organization” to be edited in
2020, or for a special issue in an international
journal.
The next Scientific Meeting of CLADAG will beheld in Florence, in September 2021.
Francesca Greselin and Giovanni Porzio(II) CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
We are pleased to announce that the Joint
Advanced School ERS-IASC and CLADAG, on

ROBUST STATISTICS: FOUNDATIONS AND
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS will take place on
May 4-8, 2020, at Villa del Grumello, on the
shores of the Lake of Como, Italy:
https://rsfd.lakecomoschool.org/.
INSTRUCTORS: Anthony Atkinson, London School of
Economics, UK Agustin Mayo-Iscar, University of Valladolid,
ES Marco Riani, University of Parma, IT
 Anna Maria Paganoni, Politecnico di Milano,
IT
RobustStatistics@ComoLakeSchool is focused on
giving a perspective on the modern challenges ofrobust statistics, combining novel statisticaltechniques with open problems in different
application fields.
PROGRAM
Robust statistics is at the forefront of statisticalresearch, and a central topic in multidisciplinaryscience where mathematical ideas are used tomodel and understand the real world.
It is almost inevitable, when analyzing big data, tohave to cope with errors or outliers. An outlier isan observation (or subset of observations) that
seems inconsistent with the rest of the data set.
Robust Statistics aims at reducing the incorrect
measurement risks generated by outliers.
While outliers are generally easy to identify in low
dimensional datasets, when it comes tomultivariate data, or even heterogeneous
multivariate data, this task becomes very difficultand must be based on a solid foundation.
In some applied fields, often the so-called"outliers" are of paramount interest (fraud
detection is an example). Sometimes, additionally,outliers might cluster in such a way that they
become interesting for their own pattern, which
can be properly disentangled from the bulk of thedata with the aid of robust methods.
The aim of the course is three-fold: present novel models to describe real-world
phenomena and their properties;
 study their behavior under different kinds ofcontamination;
 discuss their implementation throughcomputational methods in R and Matlab, withextensive applications to real data.

The topics covered by the course include
regression,
multivariate
analysis,transformations, unsupervised classificationand functional analysis. The school is designed
for postgraduate development for bothresearchers and professional data analysts.

APPLICATIONSIn order to foster active interaction among students
and instructors, the school is targeted for a class ofat most 30 qualified and selected participants.
Deadline for applications: March 4, 2020.
Francesca Greselin, Salvatore Ingrassia

News from VOC
The Dutch/Flemish classification society (VOC)
will be celebrating its 35th anniversary with a twoday Jubilee Meeting November 21-22 2019 at the
Wageningsche
Berg,
Wageningen,
The
Netherlands. The programme will cover exciting
topics related to classification and ordinationreflecting the width of the field. Please keep an eye
on www.voc.ac for more information.
Katrijn Van Deun

MBC2: Call for Papers

Upcoming Conferences and Meetings
January 2020
Workshop and Winter School Geometric andTopological Data Analysis, Guanajuato, Mexico,
January
20-24
2020,
http://atd2020.eventos.cimat.mx/.
Workshop on advances in data science for big andcomplex data, Paris, France, January 23-24, 2020,
http://vladowiki.fmf.unilj.si/doku.php?id=sda:meet:pa20.
February 2020
XII International Symposium on Mathematical
Methods Applied to the Sciences and 11th
SoLCAD Encounter for Data Analysis andClassification, San José, Costa Rica, February 2528, 2020, http://simmac.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/en.
April 2020
JOCLAD 2020, Lissabon, Portugal, April 02-04,
2020, at the Universidade Lusófona de Lisboa,
http://www.joclad.ipt.pt/joclad2020/.
May 2020
Joint Advanced School ERS-IASC and CLADAG,
on Robust Statistics, Villa del Grumello, Italy,
May 4-8, 2020, https://rsfd.lakecomoschool.org/.

The Fifth International Workshop MBC2
(September 2-4, 2020) will focus on Models andLearning in Clustering and Classification. It isorganized by the Department of Economics andBusiness of the University of Catania (Italy). The
workshop aims at providing a focus on the stateof-the-art research in the field of statistical models
and learning techniques in different areas ofclustering and classification. Scientific discussions
and debates among young and senior researchers
are strongly encouraged. The workshop will takeplace with the support of the Italian StatisticalSociety and the Classification and Data Analysis
Group (CLADAG). Interested people are invited
to submit an abstract and some background
literature by May 8, 2020. For more information,
visit the website mbc2.unict.it or contact
mbc2@unict.it

June 2020
Annual meeting of The Classification Society,
Lewisburg,
USA,
June
17-20,
2020,
https://tcs.wildapricot.org/Meeting.
V Latin American Conference on StatisticalComputing, Mexico City, Mexico, June 9-11,
2020.

Salvatore Ingrassia

August 2021
IFCS 2021, Porto, Portugal, August 24-28, 2021,
www.ifcs2021.fep.up.pt.

July 2020
IBC 2020, Seoul, Korea, July 5-10, 2020,
https://www.ibc2020.org/welcome/welcome.
September 2020
MBC2, Catania, Italy, September 16-18, 2020,
mbc2.unict.it
European Conference on Data Analysis, Napoli,
Italy,
September
16-18,
2020,
http://www.ecda2020.unina.it/.

Looking Ahead to IFCS Newsletter
Number 61
Contributions for the forthcoming issue of the
IFCS newsletter should be sent to Katrijn Van
Deun, IFCS Publication Officer, atk.vandeun@uvt.nl by March 13.
Plain text or Word files are preferred. Thanks!
Katrijn Van Deun
IFCS Publication Officer