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We are deeply saddened to learn that Prof. Peter Armitage – former President and Honorary Life Member of the International Biometric Society – died last week, aged 99 years. We remember Peter for the depth and breadth of his statistical insight, the kindness and generosity of his dealings with scientific colleagues, and not least for the selflessness of his major retirement project: the Encyclopedia of Biostatistics , co-edited with Ted Colton. There is more detail about Peter's life and work available on the MRC Biostatistics Unit website: https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/blog/remembering-peter-armitage/ The British and Irish Region of the International ...
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2023 Young Biometrician Award We are happy to announce that the winner of the 2023 Young Biometrician Award is Dr Oliver Crook , a Florence Nightingale Fellow (Senior Research Associate) in the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, for his paper “Semi-Supervised Nonparametric Bayesian Modelling of Spatial Proteomics” (The Annals of Applied Statistics, 2022). The panel felt that Oliver’s paper was extremely well written, with a clear description of an impressive technical analysis and implementation of complex stochastic modelling. The paper gave a clear, readable outline of the application area and spatial proteomics, and provided ample justification ...
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The Young Biometrician Award of the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society and the Fisher Memorial Trust The British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society, jointly with the Fisher Memorial Trust, award a prize every two years for young biometricians who are members of the BIR. Young biometricians are defined as those within 5 years of completing full-time education. The award recognises the research of one paper published, or accepted for publication, in a refereed journal. This award comprises a diploma and a prize of £1000. This is the sixth time the award will be made. We are now making a call for nominations ...
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On 29 November 2022, just over twenty statisticians gathered at the Royal Statistical Society from all corners of Britain and Ireland for the first in-person meeting of our regional biometricians in nearly three years. The meeting began with the society AGM where, after receiving reports from the officers, the most notable item of business was an update of our bylaws to include student representation on the committee. This proposal was passed at the meeting, but also requires the agreement of the society at large. Members have hopefully already been contacted to cast their vote about the proposed changes. The second component of the meeting was called "This ...
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The British and Irish Region once again joined forces with the Fisher Memorial Trust (FMT) to offer bursaries to support attendance at the International Biometric Conference at Riga (IBC 2022). John Addy, a bursary recipient, has kindly sent to us a report to share his experience: The 75th International Biometric Conference (IBC) was held in the beautiful and historic Latvian capital Riga in 2022. Riga is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has the largest population of all three Baltic capital cities. The IBC 2022 is the second IBC I have attended and the only international event of its kind run exclusively for statisticians, mathematicians, and biological scientists ...
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On 3 rd May 2022, the British and Irish Region of the Biometric Society hosted an online meeting on Variational Bayes. Variational Bayes is a computational method that allows scalable Bayesian inference that can be used as an alternative to the more commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. The meeting consisted of an introduction to Variational Bayes given in the morning by Dr David Hughes (University of Liverpool). David introduced the basic concepts of variational approximations using a simple example to demonstrate the main ideas. Mean Field Variational Bayes attempts to approximate a complex posterior using a product of simpler distributions. ...
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Delighted to share the good news that our immediate past-President, Prof. Ruth King, has received the Royal Statistical Society's Barnett Award in recognition of her exceptional work in statistical ecology. The tribute also acknowledges her many contributions to statistics and statisticians more broadly, including her distinguished leadership of the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society. See for yourself at https://rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2022/general-news/announcing-our-honours-recipients-for-2022/ Many congratulations, Ruth!
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Many of you will have heard through other channels the very sad news of the death of Sir David Cox earlier this week. David was an Honorary Life Member of the International Biometric Society, and a longtime friend of our British and Irish Region. Asked at a conference what he worked on, David replied, "Oh, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that". This charming understatement highlights two important aspects of David's life: his extraordinary humility, and the staggering breadth of his contributions to the field of statistics and its applications beyond. We remember David with fondness and gratitude, and send our deepest sympathy to his family, and to ...
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A series of events on the topic of advanced spatial sampling was held on the 24 th March 2021. The day was split into two parts with the morning dedicated to a workshop on Spatial sampling: some principles and practicalities and was run by Professor Murray Lark and the afternoon dedicated to a series of three webinars by Professor Janine Illian, Dr Peter Henrys and Dr Eleni Matechou. Both events were run online using zoom and with great participation. We had a sell-out of 31 participants to the morning workshop and around 58 attendees to the free afternoon webinars. The morning workshop focussed on three principles, sampling to estimate the mean, sampling ...
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The 8th Channel Network Conference will take place at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, France from 7th to 9th of April 2021. There will be two keynote speakers: Jeanine Houwing-Duistermaat (University of Leeds, School of Mathematics, Statistics Institute), Mathias Drton ( Technical University of Munich, Department of Mathematics), and three short courses: Practical deep learning with R, Adaptive group-regularization in prediction, Non-parametric Bayesian methods for classification. The deadline for abstract submission is on 15th January 2021 and for registration is on 25th March 2021 (early bird registration ...
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YBA 2019 winner announced

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Young Biometrician Award The British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS-BIR), jointly with the Fisher Memorial Trust, award a prize every two years for young biometricians who are members of the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society. The award recognises the research of one paper published, or accepted for publication, in a refereed journal. This award comprises a diploma and a prize of £1000 and will be presented at the conference dinner. We are delighted to announce that the BIR-FMT 2019 Young Biometrician Award has been won by Sean Yiu for the paper “Covariate association eliminating weights: a unified ...
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David Finney Lecture

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The British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society is sponsoring the 3rd David Finney Lecture. Professor Ian Dryden will be giving the lecture on 10th June 2019 at the Bayes Centre, Edinburgh 6-8pm. Registration is free, but required for catering purposes. Please register here. Lecture Title: Object Data Driven Discovery. Abstract: Object data analysis is an important tool in the many disciplines where the data have much richer structure than the usual numbers or vectors. An initial question to ask is: what are the most basic data units? i.e. what are the atoms of the data? We describe an introduction to this topic, where the statistical ...
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The call for abstracts is now open until 31st March for CNC 2019. Further details of the conference can be found here. The conference organisers are please to announce a range of prizes available to both best poster presentation and best student oral presentation. Bursaries are available to members of the BIR, with application details found here.
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The BIR and Fisher Memorial Trust are offering 5 bursaries of up to £300 each for career-young biometricians to attend the 7th Channel Network Conference, July 10-12, at Rothamsted. Applications should consist of a cover letter, a one-page CV, and the abstract submitted to the conference website. In the cover letter, please make your case for support, stating clearly any other financial support you have or will seek to attend the conference, and importance of the conference to you. Ensure that your CV makes clear that you are `career-young' i.e. have not been employed as a biometrician for more than five years (excluding career breaks). Bursary applicants must ...
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The British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS-BIR), jointly with the Fisher Memorial Trust, award a prize every two years for young biometricians who are members of the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society. Young biometricians are defined as those within 5 years of completing full-time education (excluding career breaks); for a PhD the end date is set at the viva examination. The award recognizes the research of one paper published, or accepted for publication, in a refereed journal. This award comprises a diploma and a prize of £1000. We are now making a call for nominations for the 2019 award, with 28 ...
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Registration is now open for the next IBC in Barcelona 8-13 July . Early-bird registration ends on 16th April, so register early to make substantial savings on the full cost.
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The British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS-BIR), jointly with the Fisher Memorial Trust, award a prize every two years for young biometricians who are members of the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society. Young biometricians are defined as those within 5 years of completing full-time education; for a PhD the end date is set at the viva examination. The award recognizes the research of one paper published, or accepted for publication, in a refereed journal. This award comprises a diploma and a prize of £1000. This is the fourth time the award will be made; it was won in 2011 by Rachel McCrea (University of ...
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The BIR and the Fisher Memorial Trust are awarding up to 5 bursaries each of £300 to help career-young biometricians attend the 6th Channel Network Conference in Belgium (at University of Hasselt on 24-26th April 2017) to present their work. Further information on the conference can be found here. In this context, career-young means within full-time education working on biometrical topics or employed as a biometrician for less than 5 years. Applicants must be members of the BIR and employed or studying in the UK or Ireland at the closing date. Applications should be submitted by email to the Regional Secretary, Sue Welham , by 31st Jan 2017 and applicants ...
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“Rare Diseases: Regulatory and Study Design Considerations” Date: 16th November, 2:00-3:30 GMT John Scott (Deputy Director of the Division of Biostatistics in FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research) U.S. regulatory considerations and case studies for rare diseases Lisa Hampson (Lecturer in Statistics, Lancaster University) Bayesian methods for the design and interpretation of clinical trials in rare diseases The webinar is free to attend. See abstracts and to register.
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The 2016 Fisher Memorial Lecture will be held on 27th October at the RSS. The lecturer is Nancy Reid (University of Toronto) on "Statistical Science and Data Science: where do we go from here?". The lecture will form part of a joint meeting on Data Science between the RSS, Fisher Memorial trust and the London Mathematical Society.
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