A Lunch Time Discussion Group (LTDG) at the ISI World Statistics Congress in Kuala Lumpur is an opportunity to enjoy food, fellowship and a conversation with colleagues about a statistical concept or related topic in practice while enjoying your lunch. The discussion groups allow networking and interaction with other like-minded colleagues.

The format for the LTDG’s will be a little different than in previous World Statistics Congresses. They will start at 12:50 to 13:45 Monday through Friday on the days of the conference and will be held in the session rooms. This allows time for each participant to purchase their lunch prior to the start of the LTDG. The final program of LTDG's will be advertised on the WSC and ISI websites. There will be no additional charge nor a need for a pre-registration to join a LTDG. Participants may decide to join during the WSC. However, to obtain indications of interest and numbers, an ISI form will be available closer to the WSC to allow participants to register intent to participate.

Here are some examples of previous LTDGs:

  • Statistical Sciences in the Era of Big Data
  • Urban/rural classifications - can we do better?
  • How young statistician’s associations help in raising statistical awareness, empowering and qualifying young statisticians to lead the statistical work in the future
  • Assessment Methodology for Rare and Endangered Plant/Animal Species and its Improvement
  • Statistics, Machine Learning and Big Data
  • The Spirit of Official Statistics: Partnership and Continuous Innovation
  • Statistics from gender perspective for overall development and wellbeing
  • What do we do about the 'literacy' in statistical literacy, at the college level?
  • Bayes and Big Data
  • Communication strategies for statistical information: A common interest of national and international producers of statistics
  • The Role of Statistics in the Big Data Era of Genomic and Epigenomic Research
  • Agriculture Data Collection and Use: How to benefit farmers?
  • Building Partnership between Statistical Consultants and Industries
  • Judiciary intrusions in the production of official statistics
  • Developing Leadership Skills in Women
  • Preparing students for the workforce

We would love to see proposals for topics from any ISI member, from each Association and Special Interest Group and from partnerships. This would be a great opportunity to highlight common interests and collaboration between associations and special interest groups. Ideally, each ISI Association and Special Interest Group should organize and host or co-host
one or more LTDGs.

At this point in time, we invite you and your colleagues to submit any ideas that you feel would make for a good LTDG for the 2019 World Statistics Congress in Kuala Lumpur. Please submit your proposals here by 15 April 2019.

To propose a lunch time discussion group, you will need to enter the following information in the form:

  1. Name and contact information as the Discussion Leader;
  2. Title for the lunch time discussion group;
  3. Which ISI Associations or Special Interest Groups (SIGs) might be interested in this discussion;
  4. Short description/abstract for the discussion;
  5. One or two key questions that would be shared with participants to prepare for a productive discussion.

For further information please contact ISI Vice-President Natalie Shlomo at natalie.shlomo@manchester.ac.uk