Statistics at a Crossroads: Challenges and Opportunities in the Data Science Era

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The workshop "Statistics at a Crossroads: Challenges and Opportunities in the Data Science Era" is scheduled to take place at the Crystal Gateway Marriot, Arlington, Virginia, October 15-17, 2018. A previous workshop was held at the National Science Foundation in 2002 to discuss the future challenges and opportunities for the statistics community. That was a time when the statistics community saw rapid changes and sustained growth from the emergence of more and larger-scale data. Since then, the growth of the field, including the size of the undergraduate and graduate programs in statistics and the breadth of interactions between statistics and other fields, has accelerated. In the meantime, both the public and the private sectors have embraced big data, as more and more people recognize that big data can provide insights into the nature of biological processes, precision medicine, climate change, social and economic behavior, risk assessment and decision making. The statistics community recognizes that we are at a crossroads with an unprecedented opportunity to modernize the discipline to become the major player in data science, but also with a non-ignorable risk to make ourselves obsolete in the broad community of data science. The proposed workshop asks a critical question, where do we go from here? The workshop seeks to invite leading researchers and educators in statistics and data science to address the question and to produce a report narrating the challenges to, and opportunities for, statistics stakeholders (e.g., individual researchers, academic departments, and funding agencies). The steering committee of the workshop has identified six themes for in-depth discussion. They are (1) Foundations of statistics and data science; (2) Statistics and computation; (3) Emerging applications; (4) Data challenges; (5) Inference in the age of big data; and (6) Statistics education in the new era. These themes were identified to cover a wide range of issues and research topics that are timely and forward-looking for the purpose of discussion. Pre- and post-workshop discussions via online forums are planned to seek broader community input. The workshop report will be made available to the National Science Foundation and to the scientific community at large. The recommendations made at the workshop will provide guidance to young researchers and students who pursue careers in quantitative fields and beyond. The workshop will also promote participation of women and other under-represented groups in the research community. More information can be found at the workshop website https://hub.ki/groups/statscrossroad/overview.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.