Our colleagues Jackie Potts, Ian Hunt and Altea Lorenzo-Arribas attended the Royal Statistical Society  (RSS) Conference on 2-5 September in Brighton. The conference attracted more than 700 attendees from over 30 countries and was the perfect opportunity for networking and catching up with old friends, including BioSS associate Javier Palarea-Albaladejo.

Jackie presented a poster on “Statistical considerations in the design of a soil monitoring scheme”, based on work with colleagues at the James Hutton Institute.

Ian showcased his work “Comparing predictive microbiology models in food safety” (see slide below).

Altea who is a member of the conference board, presented the talk “Mary Eleanor Spear: the art behind data visualisation and its didactics” as part of a session on  Hidden Figures in Statistics, co-organised by the Celebrating Diversity Special Interest Group of the Society and the History of Statistics Section. A recording of this session will be made available soon.

Amongst conference highlights was the Barnett Lecture by former BioSS colleague David Borchers (University of St Andrews) who gave an entertaining and informative talk about the challenges (both statistical and technological) of acoustic surveys of gibbons using spatial capture-recapture methods. 

Another session of  interest covered the work of the RSS Climate Change and Net Zero Task Force and their statistical explainers (so far on the 1.5°C global mean warming target and extreme weather).  Finally, in his talk “Data Science in Production” Hadley Wickham (Posit) discussed a series of powerful tools for the statistical profession, and recommended parquet as an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval.

We are looking forward to next year’s conference in Edinburgh! The call for invited sessions is now open. 

Featured in picture (clockwise): Jackie Potts presenting her poster, Ian Hunt’s slide and Altea talking to the audience.