The last 10-15 years have seen the great emergence of drug development efforts in the rare disease space. Contributing factors include increased public awareness, encouraging drug regulation changes, scientific advancement in cellular/molecular biology and genetics, development of innovative trial designs, large influx of capital investment, availability of scientific talent through decades of cultivation, etc.

As a result, a great number of regulators, academicians, and industry statisticians now work to bring these orphan drugs to patients, facing unique technical issues and challenges. However, at least in the US, there is no statistical conference dedicated to such unique issues and challenges. Given the large unmet need, the New England Statistical Society (NESS) proposes this unique conference so that statisticians across the entire rare disease drug development spectrum have a common “home” to exchange ideas and share experiences, and also to network.

NERDS Workshop aims to be a one-day workshop with detailed presentations and discussions. Speakers from industry, academia, and government are invited. Topics will cover technical issues, regulation interpretation, industry trends, and case studies of both success and failure stories.

Promotional flyer in PDF.

UCSAS (http://uconnsportsanalytics.org) is to be hosted by UConn on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2019. It is the first sports analytics conference that is initiated by students and focuses on students.

Call For Poster Presentations

Have an interesting sports analytics project to present? We welcome poster presentations from both students and non-students.

About UCSAS

While there are many well-established sports analytics conferences, such as New England Symposium on Sports in Statistics (NESSIS) or the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, they are often not accessible to students due to technical level, cost, or space limitations. UConn, recognized nationally for its teams in sports such as basketball, baseball, and hockey, among others, will host the UConn Sports Analytics Symposium (UCSAS), which will focus specifically on undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in sports analytics. UCSAS, organized by the Statistical Data Science Lab at UConn and co-sponsored by the UConn Data Science Club (a student organization), aims to: 1) showcase sports analytics to students at an accessible level; 2) train students in data analytics with application to sports data; and 3) foster collaboration between academic programs and the sports industry.

Three Keynote Presentations

+ Dr. Gregory J. Matthews, Assistant Professor, Loyola University Chicago: How Often Does the Best Team Win? A Unified Approach to Understanding Randomness in North American Sport
+ Dr. Meredith J. Wills, Sports Data Product Specialist, SMT (SportsMEDIA Technology Corp): How to Catch a Fly(ball) with Chopsticks?
+ Dr. Brian Macdonald, Director of Data Analytics, ESPN: An Overview of Data Science Problems in the Sports Industry

Five Training Workshops:

Five parallel, 2-hour training workshops led by experienced graduate students from the Department of Statistics at UConn offer training from jumpstart to advanced sports analytic skills.
• (Introductory level) Introduction to R: Tuhin Sheikh
• (Introductory level) Introduction to Python: Jun Jin
• (Intermediate level) Data Visualization with R: Yiming Zhang
• (Intermediate level) Baseball Analytics with R: Zhe Wang
• (Advanced level) Web Scraping for Sports Data: Wanwan Xu