Concluding Remarks of the International Statistics Conference 2024

Concluding Remarks of the International Statistics Conference 2024 (ISC 2024)

The 4^th triennial International Statistics Conference organized by the Institute of Applied Statistics Sri Lanka (IASSL), International Statistics Conference 2024 (ISC 2024), was held 28 – 29 December 2024 at Cinnamon Lakeside, Colombo. Department of Statistics, Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura (USJ) was the local collaborator of the conference while Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada was its international collaborator.

The theme of ISC 2024 was “Unleashing the power of data: Harnessing the Synergy between Statistics and Data Science”. The main objective of the event was to bring together data scientists/statisticians from across the world and provide a platform for them to share their latest research findings on theory and applications of data science/statistics with Sri Lankan data scientists/statisticians. Further, the event also facilitated an immense opportunity for Sri Lankan undergraduates/postgraduates/academics/data Scientists/statisticians to develop collaborations with world renowned researchers/academics/data scientists/statisticians.

As the local collaborator, staff and BSc (honours in Statistics) students took the leading role in organizing and contributed immensely to the event during the past one and a half years. The two-day conference was packed with various academic and industry sessions relevant to the theme. This included six invited talk sessions, seven invited group sessions, two industry talks, two industry invited group sessions and sixteen contributory sessions. Around fifty invited/contributory foreign speakers from different parts of the world were present. In total, each day around 200 attendees were present. The event was a huge success and received excellent feedback from all international and local delegates, invited speakers and participants of ISC 2024. The conference also conducted two competitions: ISC 2024 Case Study Poster Competition and IASSL National Poster Competition. Both competitions were well received by Sri Lankan school children and undergraduates.

The pre-conference workshop of ISC 2024 was also held on the 27^th December, 2024 at the BLC, Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura. The theme of the conference was “Sports Analytics” and the resource persons consisted of a team from Simon Fraser University, Canada led by Prof. Tim Swartz, a world-renowned sports analytics researcher. Around fifty local/international participants were present for this one-day workshop. I would like to thank the Dean’s office staff and the coordinator and the technical officers of the BLC for assisting us with the arrangements.