Unisa’s Science Campus is gearing up for the 60th Conference of the South African Statistical Association (SASA), proudly hosted by the Department of Statistics in the College of Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET). The conference is set to take place from 26–29 November 2018 at our Science campus in Florida (Roodepoort), which is located to the West of Johannesburg
As always, the annual SASA conference will bring together statisticians and researchers in related fields from around the country and abroad, to share their research, discuss new ideas, and form collaborations. According to Professor Mamba, the Executive Dean of CSET “The conference also provides the opportunity to expose research opportunities in the area of Statistics. By hosting the conference, we are highlighting the importance of Statistics as a subject discipline to be pursued at tertiary institutions particularly, since it has an impact in our daily lives and also for the country as a whole. Statistics is key in decision making and also on modelling future projections, not to mention problem solving”.
The conference itself will focus on knowledge transfer and scientific advances, to crown what is an important year for our institution. This prestigious conference will further provide a platform for showcasing Unisa and the college to industry, academics, scientists and other stakeholders, by highlighting the kind of research Unisans are currently conducting and the technologies its staff and students are developing. Delegates will also be afforded a chance to tour Unisa’s state-of-the-art facilities and laboratory infrastructure.
The programme
The organising committee of the 60th SASA conference has put together an impressive line-up of distinguished speakers, including well-known scholars and experts in the field of statistics, such as Prof Berthold Lausen (University of Essex, UK), Dr Saralees Nadarajah (University of Manchester, UK) and Prof Louise Ryan (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia). We also look forward to welcoming Prof Jim Ridgway (School of Education, Durham University, UK) as a guest of the SASA Education Committee.
So far, over a hundred abstracts have been submitted for oral presentations in the parallel sessions, and over 40 abstracts for the poster sessions. In addition to session focusing on the various statistical fields such as Bayesian statistics and multivariate data analysis, the conference will include parallel sessions in, amongst others, biostatistics, big data and data science, business and industrial statistics, statistics in education, spatial statistics and statistical ecology, as well as a special stream for young statisticians. The first day of the conference will host a variety of full-day and half-day workshops.
SASA awards
This year, SASA will once again confer a Thought Leader Award on one of its members, thanks to generous sponsorship from SAS South Africa. A Though Leader is deemed to be someone who has had a marked impact on the South African statistical community, across a wide range of activities, in addition to having made a significant contribution to academia, industry, government, or any other domain. Criteria include contributions to leadership, knowledge generation and human capital development, the impact of the work/research and the ability to attract funding. The conference also includes a competition for postgraduate students for the best Master’s and Doctoral presentations.
We extend a special invitation to our postgraduate students – who we hope will take advantage of the preferential registration fees on offer – to join the rest of the Statistics community at this exciting event.
We look forward to welcoming all our delegates to Unisa in November!
For enquiries, please email SASA2018@unisa.ac.za or visit the website at www.sastat.org.za/sasa2018.
Publish date: 2018-10-17 00:00:00.0