RSSeNEWS to be determined...

Standing (from left): Kaye Bashford (Australia), Sharif A Abdelhalim (IDB, Saudi Arabia), Magued Oslam (chair, LOC, Egypt), Jef Tuegel (ISI president, Belgium), Zeinab Amin (co-chair, LOC, Egypt), Mohammad Hanif Mian (ISOSS vice president, Pakistan), Edward Wegman (USA), Jim Berger (USA).

Sitting (from left): Shahjahan Khan (ISOSS president, Australia), Wafik Younan (treasurer, LOC, Egypt), Ali S Hadi (ISOSS president elect, USA/Egypt).

The 10th Islamic Countries Conference on Statistical Sciences (ICCS-X) was successfully held at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in December with over 300 participants from all over the world. The biennial conference was jointly organised by the Islamic Countries Society of Statistical Sciences (ISOSS), the Egyptian Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC) and the AUC. It was financially sponsored by the Islamic Development Bank (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia), the Egyptian Ministries of Tourism and Investments, ISDC and AUC. It was dedicated to the late Mir Maswood Ali, a prominent statistician of Bangladesh origin and key founder of the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, University of Western Ontario, Canada.

In the opening session, Lisa Anderson, provost of AUC, spoke about the importance and diverse applications of statistics from the ancient need of the States to modern day public affairs. The ISOSS president, Shahjahan Khan of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, emphasised the essence of engagements between the statisticians from the developed countries and those in the developing countries, especially those of the IOC member states for improving the quality of government statistics and statistical research and enhancing its state-of-the-art applications. Magued Osman, chair of the local organising committee and head of IDSC, spoke about the role of statistics for development and good governance. Ali S Hadi, vice provost of AUC, current chief editor of ISI Review, and chair of the scientific and programmes committee, welcomed the participants and covered different scientific and cultural activities of the conference.

The highlights of the conference included the participation of four keynote speakers. Jef L Teugels, president of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), spoke on the extreme value distributions with applications. He analysed data of natural calamities/disasters with extremes coming from the 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh and the hurricane Katrina in the southern USA. Jim Berger covered the Bayesian adjustments of multiplicity in the testing regime of huge number of tests coming from multidisciplinary scientific studies. Edward Wegman, who testified in the USA Congress twice on the scientific aspects of climate change issues, discussed the rapid changes in data science and took the audience to the outer universe of huge datasets and the associated challenges to analyse them for scientific applications. Kaye Bashford, former president of the Statistical Society of Australia Inc, presented her address on some applications of multivariate data analysis for determining the best quality of wheat production. The data presented in the talk were from an international team of experts working on the project around the world.

The theme of the conference was ‘Statistics for development and good governance’. A series of panel discussions related to this theme took place:

• public opinion polling and good governance
• measuring the unmeasurable
• indicators and politics, the Ibrahim Index for African Governance.

Another salient feature of the conference was the presentation of invited sessions on topics such as statistics education, demography and aging, small area sampling, medical meta-analysis, statistical inference, astrostatistics, directional data analysis, etc. These sessions attracted leading scholars and researchers in the areas and benefited the participants enormously. Young and new researchers found the sessions stimulating for their future research. More details on the conference programme and other activities of ISOSS can be found on its website.

Social activities included a Nile Cruise Gala Dinner and a visit to the pyramids in Giza.

The business session of the conference was held in the evening of 21 December at the Marry Cross Hall of AUC. The president of ISOSS chaired the session and reported the main activities and achievements of ISOSS during the last two years following the conference in Kuala Lumpur. The session re-elected Shahjahan Khan as the president of ISOSS for 2009-2011 and Ali S Hadi as the president-elect for 2011-2013.

Report by Shahjahan Khan