In the Dark

I received the following email about a forthcoming conference which is probably of interest to a (statistically) significant number of readers of this blog so I thought I’d share it here with an encouragement to attend:

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IAUS306 – Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology

We are pleased to announce the IAU Symposium 306 on Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology, which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal from 26-29 May 2014, with a tutorial day on 25 May.  Apologies if you receive this more than once.

Full exploitation of the very large surveys of the Cosmic Microwave Background, Large-Scale Structure, weak gravitational lensing and future 21cm surveys will require use of the best statistical techniques to answer the major cosmological questions of the 21st century, such as the nature of Dark Energy and gravity.

Thus it is timely to emphasise the importance of inference in cosmology, and to promote dialogue between astronomers and statisticians. This has been recognized by the creation of the IAU Working Group in Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics in 2012.

IAU Symposium 306 will be devoted to problems of inference in cosmology, from data processing to methods and model selection, and will have an important element of cross-disciplinary involvement from the statistics communities.

Keynote speakers

• Cosmic Microwave Background :: Graca Rocha (USA / Portugal)

• Weak Gravitational Lensing :: Masahiro Takada (Japan)

• Combining probes :: Anais Rassat (Switzerland)

• Statistics of Fields :: Sabino Matarrese (Italy)

• Large-scale structure :: Licia Verde (Spain)

• Bayesian methods :: David van Dyk (UK)

• 21cm cosmology :: Mario Santos (South Africa / Portugal)

• Massive parameter estimation :: Ben Wandelt (France)

• Overwhelmingly large datasets :: Alex Szalay (USA)

• Errors and nonparametric estimation :: Aurore Delaigle (Australia)

You are invited to submit an abstract for a contributed talk or poster for the meeting, via the meeting website. The deadline for abstract submission is 21st March 2014. Full information on the scientific rationale, programme, proceedings, critical dates, and local arrangements will be on the symposium web site here.

Deadlines

13 January 2014 – Grant requests

21 March 2014 – Abstract submission

4 April 2014 – Notification of abstract acceptance

11 April 2014 – Close of registration

30 June 2014 – Manuscript submission

This entry was posted on December 2, 2013 at 9:43 am and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, IAU, statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.