You are cordially invited to submit an abstract for presentation at the Fifth Joint Conference of the Upstate Chapters of the American Statistical Association, which will be held at Canisius College on Friday and Saturday, April 22-23, 2016. The deadline for abstract submission is Friday, March 11, 2016.

As you prepare your abstract and presentation, please keep in mind that the focus is not on technical rigor, but instead on clarity of exposition and ease of access by our audience, which may have a substantial number of students and AP Statistics teachers. As a matter of fact, we strongly encourage students and AP Statistics teachers to participate actively. Prizes will be awarded to students for the best general presentation, the best applied statistics presentation, and the best poster presentation.

The deadline for the submission of the abstract is Friday, March 11, 2016, and notification of acceptance for a poster or oral presentation will be sent out on Friday, March 25, 2016. To submit your abstract, please send it to the Conference Program Chair, Dr. Michael McDermott at the address listed below. All submissions should be submitted as follows:

The Program Committee strongly encourages all participants to seriously consider organizing a session on a statistics/data science theme of their choice. All sessions must have a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 3 speakers. Please note that each session will be 45-50 minutes in duration. It will be the responsibility of the session organizer to invite the speakers and ensure that the speakers attend the conference. The session organizer may also be a speaker in his/her session. All session organizers will have their conference fees (registration and Friday night dinner) waived; in addition, session organizers who are students will receive a prize and an UP-STAT 2016 Certificate of Leadership. Finally, all student presenters in sessions organized by a student will also have their conference fees (registration and Friday night dinner) waived. If you choose to organize a session, you should submit the following information to the Conference Program Chair, Dr. Michael McDermott, e-mail: gro.tats-pu@stcartsba: organizer's name, session title, and presenter names, affiliations (department/institution or company), titles, and abstracts. Abstracts should follow the general guidelines provided below. Please indicate UP-STAT 2016 Session Proposal in the "Subject" line of the e-mail and also indicate whether or not each session participant (including the organizer) is a student. The deadline for submission of an organized session is Friday, March 4, 2016.

Selected Themes For This Year's Conference

Novel contributions to statistical methods or computing

If you have developed new statistical methods or approaches to the analysis of data, we strongly encourage you to consider submitting an abstract to present your work.

Applications of statistical methods to interesting data sets from biology/medicine, social sciences, business/finance, and other fields

If you are an applied statistician working in academia or in industry, and have worked on interesting problems involving the analysis of large, complex data sets, then consider submitting an abstract to present your problem and the analysis that you performed to gain insight into your scientific question.

Issues in statistics / data science education

If you have taught courses related to statistics or data science to high school students, undergraduate students, or graduate students, consider giving a presentation on novel approaches that you may have implemented. Presentations that touch on the role that other disciplines should play in developing curricula in these fields would also be of great interest.

Statistics education in secondary schools (and beyond)

Given the vital importance of promoting statistics in education, we would especially encourage abstract submissions pertinent to statistics education in secondary schools (and beyond). Presentations could involve motivating examples of experimental design or statistical analysis derived from real-world problems; strategies for emphasizing the connections between probability and the development, evaluation, and implementation of statistical methods that are used to analyze data; ideas on how to integrate frequentist and Bayesian philosophies in a balanced curriculum; or any other innovative ideas concerning this topic.